Until the Solstice Rises
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: A series of Advent fics, containing the following pairings: HPDM, HPSS, SSHPDM. A new story every day from the first of December until the Solstice rises. The stories are individual and not all holiday themed. COMPLETE.
1. Until the Solstice Rises

**Title: **Until the Solstice Rises

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and her associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Present tense, omniscient POV, fluff

**Wordcount:** 900

**Summary: **Through the solstice night, until the sun rises, Harry and Draco touch each other.

**Author's Notes: **This is the first of my Advent fics, inspired by prompts that readers on LJ left me. ldydark1 asked for Harry/Draco, "what to do on the darkest night."

**Until the Solstice Rises**

They lie in a room with no light. No candles, no fire, no lamps. No sun. This is the night of the solstice, and as the world breathes in Midwinter, they breathe in cold, darkness, motionlessness except for their hands that slide down sides, up ribs, around arms, into mouths.

They touch each other.

* * *

Harry knows the touch of Draco's hair, the delicate flex of it, and the ends that _almost _curl but don't, quite. It brushes against his palms, and he kisses it and follows it with his mouth when Draco turns his head away, sighing. Harry catches Draco's face close, palms to cheeks, warm as fire's embers, and kisses him again and again, hair and cheeks and drowning, open mouth, tongue limp and lazy with permission.

And as Harry knows that, so Draco knows the way Harry reacts when someone touches his scar, fingers wavering back and forth, following the lightning bolt pattern one moment, then marking unmarked forehead the next. Harry holds still for it a little while, then ducks his head, shivering, and acts as though he doesn't know what to do next. Draco lets him have his little pretense, kissing and nipping at his fringe, filling his mouth with hair.

It makes the moment when he ducks down to explore Harry's mouth again all the sweeter.

Draco touches Harry's eyelashes, flinching and fluttering and retreating, so delicate that Harry can't give him permission to touch them this time, and closes his eyes anyway. Draco kisses him, and rolls him down and under himself, on top of Harry's chest, where his heart beats with the wonder and warmth of a live thing.

Harry closes his eyes and feels Draco's warmth above him, the heat that reaches down deep and grounds him, like the running of a hot spring under the earth. He raises his hands and traces Draco's shoulders, the smooth curve of bone that is strong enough to bear more burdens than it has so far. He wonders if there is any limit to Draco's strength. Draco has been tested and has failed, but he is stronger now.

Both of them lie there for a timeless time, cradled in the darkness, both their eyes shut and their breathing deep and slow. They don't need much more than this, not right now. The world is still all around them, the sun's heartbeat stopped, even the turning of the earth different than normal. There is nothing urgent for them, nothing that need be done.

Until Draco moves forwards again and brushes his lips down Harry's cheeks, and that is done because they want to, and need follows on desire.

Harry takes Draco's arms and gently spreads them out, until their clasped hands, Draco's clenched within Harry's, are lying on the far sides of the pillow, the limit their arms can reach. Draco nods and kisses back, tongues once again lapping and twining, and then lies down chest to chest and erection to erection. He knows what Harry wants, and knows, as much as Harry does, that it will take them forever to come this way.

But what is time, to them?

Harry begins the motion, but they both continue it, hips working back and forth, rolling up and down, bones bumping now and then. They both laugh when that happens, a quiet sound so shared that they might breathe out a single puff of steam were they in the cold. But they are not. They are rocking, and it's warm.

The sheets squeak under them. Their hands ache with the pressure of their clasp. Their skin separates with a sucking sound of sweat, and their tongues grace eyebrows and chins, sometimes, unable to aim in the sightlessness.

They rub, and roll, and rut, and rock, and the pleasure that comes is lingering, tight-drawn, close around them as the shield of darkness is over the world.

The pleasure rises and then slowly arcs to earth itself in their bodies, and they both pant in staccato motions when it comes, when they come. It takes forever to pass, as they take forever to pass, and the moment is not a moment. They cling to each other when they are done, Draco resting without encumbrance or barrier on Harry, chest to chest, arm bones pressing to arm bones, wrists in contact with wrists.

Cheek to cheek.

* * *

Draco turns his head and blinks lazily when he sees the light creeping through the shutters. And under them. And around them. Their shutters are old, and lazily fitted. Furnishings are not important in this house.

He watches the first light from the other side of darkness, and so does Harry, and it falls on their bodies and wakes the colors of their skin and eyes and hair to life. The fire stirs. The lamps can shine again. The candles can be lit, as they are.

But they do not need their eyes to see each other, so they do not look, instead lying still, entwined, bright as coals on this winter morning, as alive as fire.

**The End.**


	2. Graceful Is as Graceful Does

**Title: **Graceful Is As Graceful Does

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Draco/Harry, past Harry/Ginny and Blaise/Ginny

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **Ginny-bashing, AU, newspaper article format, first-person POV

**Wordcount:** 1700

**Summary: **"An interview with Draco Malfoy, the leading British Arguer, on the publication of his new book, _I Know Better Than You Do: How to Win Cases, a Husband, and a Family All At Once, _out just in time for Christmas!"

**Author's Notes: **This is for dameange, who requested a Christmas fic set in the _Building With Worn-Out Tools _universe. This won't make much sense unless you have already read both BWWOT and its one-shot sequel, "Some Virtues of the Fairy Tale," which dameange also requested.

**Graceful Is As Graceful Does**

_The Daily Prophet: December 2nd, 2006_

_Draco Malfoy: Arguing Wins_

By: Nora Ruthson

You almost certainly know who he is. The leading British Arguer. Winner of more cases than any other Arguer in seven countries, specializing in divorces. And the Arguer who convinced the judge in the infamous Potter-Weasley divorce case to decide in favor of Mr. Potter, ensuring that he was free to do as he liked with his money and his worldly goods—which was apparently moving into Malfoy Manor and starting a family with Arguer Malfoy.

To date, Mr. Malfoy and Mr. Potter have four children, carried for them by their surrogate, Astoria Greengrass: six-year-old twin daughters, Marissa and Ianthe; a four-year-old son, Michael; and a newborn daughter, Guinevere. Ms. Greengrass herself is the owner of a successful Charms business and was recently chosen as a Special Ambassador to France.

What you may not know is that Arguer Malfoy has written a book about his experiences in the Potter-Weasley divorce case, tilted _I Know Better Than You Do: How to Win Cases, a Husband, and a Family All At Once. _I intend to read the book as soon as it comes out, and met with him in the Manor two days ago to discuss it.

I must admit that the Manor remains an impressive seat despite the rumored loss of millions of Galleons by the Malfoy family. My interview with Arguer Malfoy took place in what he said was called the Jeweled Sitting Room, and it deserves the name. With sapphire-bright panes of stained glass on the windows, and a bright sun, or at least the glamour of it, the day we spoke, we spent most of our time floating in what looked like a pool of lapidary light. The mantle is gilded, and the fireplace is made up of soft silvery stone, with discreet opals and moonstones there to lend a touch of the night sky.

Arguer Malfoy is a tall, handsome man, with white-blond hair that spills down his shoulders and the most dazzling smile I've ever seen. The dazzling smile was echoed in the features of the little girl who stood at his side, who, I soon learned, was named Marissa. She spent most of the interview asking Arguer Malfoy questions about the law, which he answered with characteristic grace and patience. It seems that he may soon have a new little Arguer in the family.

What follows is a transcript of our interview, as near as I can recall after being so dazzled.

RUTHSON: Arguer Malfoy, may I congratulate you first of all on your house, and your husband, and your beautiful children?

ARGUER MALFOY: You may.

(At this point I realized I was waiting for compliments, and I hastened to supply them. I omit them here, as I imagine that my readers will wish to supply ones of their own choosing).

ARGUER MALFOY: Thank you. I can't deny that I'm happy with Harry and with my children. (He ruffled his daughter's hair affectionately, but she moved away from him as if unhappy with the gesture, which, I suspected, is at least part of the reason that he does it). Happier than some other people, at least.

RUTHSON: You don't mean—?

ARGUER MALFOY: Oh, yes, I do. Ginny Weasley hurt my husband. I can't forgive that.

(I waited for more words, but Arguer Malfoy, in contrast to his reputation in the courtroom, is actually a man of frequent silences in person. He smiled at me and leaned back, and let me imagine what I would to fill in the gap).

RUTHSON: Well, of course we're here to discuss your book. What made you decide to write it? After all, the saga of your successful defense of Mr. Potter and your happily ever after is well-known to the majority of British readers.

ARGUER MALFOY: I believe I have given you the answer to that question already, and I don't like reporters who ask boring and repetitive questions. (There was a short pause here that contains nothing of interest). But to answer more fully, they know the saga, yes. What they don't know is that they could undergo the same thing for themselves, and win the same happiness, if they're willing to take hold of the gorgon's horns.

RUTHSON: Really?

ARGUER MALFOY: Oh, yes. I'm firmly convinced that the main reason so many people are unhappy is that they're unwilling to destroy the people who are keeping them from happiness. Glory is there, and it comes from conflict. And once the conflict is over, it comes from reminding your enemies what they lost.

RUTHSON: Some would say that your enmity against the former Mrs. Potter is—er—excessive.

ARGUER MALFOY: Well, in the book itself I reveal some reasons why I don't think so. She used the name of Harry's mother for her bastard daughter, did you know that? She said that she would during the trial, but that was an emotional manipulation used in an attempt to extract money from him. Neither of us expected she would go ahead and do it, when the case was over before her daughter's birth. And yet, she did.

RUTHSON: Did you want to use it for your own children?

ARGUER MALFOY: Some people have no understanding. But to return to the subject of my book, yes, I give outlines and steps for destroying the bastards and bitches who might oppose you in your life.

RUTHSON: Could you give us an extract from a sample chapter?

ARGUER MALFOY: Well, since there _is _the matter of payment for the interview, and since the book will be out in a week in time for Christmas, I suspect that I must.

(He picked up a slender book that lay beside him. As he lifted it, I could see that the cover was white leather, and that the photograph on the front showed him and Mr. Potter standing close together, their arms about their children. Mr. Potter was smiling as wartime photographs rarely show him doing).

"_The first time I saw Harry again, I realized he was something special. My only surprise was that the red-headed harridan had never seen it. She couldn't see beyond the limp, and the fact that she had married him expecting a public figure and he hadn't given her that. She couldn't feel the power of his magic. She couldn't remember the way he had destroyed Voldemort on the field of battle. She couldn't see those green eyes, or touch those slender hands that I knew I wanted wrapped around me._"

(I don't mind admitting that I had to fan myself a bit at that point).

ARGUER MALFOY: Harry does sometimes think that I'm being too hard on her, and painting too rosy a picture of our past. But it's all in here. His duel with my father, the arguments in the case, the kidnapping of my mother.

RUTHSON: How is your mother doing?

ARGUER MALFOY: Very well, thank you. She's now involved in a program that lets her visit with others who were damaged by the war and learn ways around that. She's learned to fly with the help of a simple charm. And she adores her grandchildren.

(He smiled at this point, and his face softened more than it had done at any point through the interview).

RUTHSON: And of course, you have your husband to comfort you.

ARGUER MALFOY: I do indeed. In fact, he was waiting for the moment when I might introduce him most comfortably. Harry?

(Harry Potter stepped into the room, giving Arguer Malfoy a look that made me have to look away. It said that he wasn't impressed, and that he was really there for some other reason, and that he was in love, all at once. Would that more of us were that lucky. But we might be, if we read Arguer Malfoy's new book).

ARGUER MALFOY: You were going to take Marissa for me, weren't you, Harry? And say something to the nice reporter.

(He handed Marissa to her second father, who lifted her with an incredible ease considering the wounds he took in the war, and nodded courteously to me).

HARRY POTTER: Hello. I do want to say, for the benefit of anyone reading this, that I forgave Ginny long ago, and—

(Arguer Malfoy surged up at this point and captured his mouth in a kiss. It went on for some time. Their daughter got bored and began whining to be let down. I had to swallow and spend a little more time fanning myself).

ARGUER MALFOY: He means that he's willing to let me speak publicly about her and about my book, aren't you, Harry?

HARRY POTTER: Being willing to do that doesn't mean I agree with you.

(But he smiled, and I could see that he, at least, was well-content with the happiness that Arguer Malfoy promised his new book could teach to anyone).

ARGUER MALFOY: That's all I feel willing to say for right now. Do read my book, though, and perhaps eliminate the witch or wizard in your life who doesn't want you to be happy. When that's done, you really can have the happiest possible life.

I was politely shown out of the Manor by house-elves at this point, and the only thing that remains to give is the publication details of Arguer Malfoy's new book:

_I Know Better Than You Do: How to Win Cases, a Husband, and a Family All At Once_

Published by Scholarly Press

Out December 10th, 2006

Oh, and there is one more thing I can say, for anyone reading this who may doubt: There can be no doubt that Mr. Potter and Arguer Malfoy are incredibly happy together, and very much in love.

**The End.**


	3. Material Abundance

**Title: **Material Abundance

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **Reference to past Dursley abuse. Otherwise, sickeningly sweet fluff.

**Wordcount:** 2000 words

**Summary: **Draco wants to give Harry the best Christmas of his life, but he really only knows one thing to give him that he doesn't already have.

**Author's Notes: **This is an Advent fic written for the request of piratesmile331, who gave me the prompt: _After learning of Harry's horrendous early childhood, Draco decides to try to make their first Christmas together extra special._

**Material Abundance**

"There must have been one present." Draco could hear the desperation in his own voice, and grimaced at the sound of it. But he couldn't take his eyes from Harry, and he couldn't control the temptation to reach over and link his fingers through Harry's.

Harry gave him a remote smile and then avoided his gaze, looking down at their linked hands instead, turning them back and forth. The sounds in the small pub had faded for Draco. He could hear the ridiculous gulps he was giving, the dry sound of his tongue licking his own lips, his breathing.

"No," Harry said. "Not unless you count the toothpicks and small coins and socks with holes in them that they liked giving me." He met Draco's eyes again, and an instant later his face had warmed and he had reached out as though he was going to cradle Draco's chin in his hands. He seemed to hesitate and pull back at the last moment, but it was a near thing. "Oh, Draco. I'm over it. I really am."

He grimaced a little, and took a small sip of his whisky. "I promise, it's okay. The Weasleys have always given me great gifts."

Draco tightened his hold on Harry's hand, and said nothing. All he could think was how _horrible _it would be to wake up on Christmas morning without a single present. His parents had always made sure that he had one at the foot of the bed, and then one at the top of the stairs, and then more dotted along the corridors to the main sitting room where the celebration would take place.

"You can't get over something like that," he said.

Harry sighed like water going down a drain. "That was why I didn't want to talk about it with you," he said, reclaiming his hand and sipping at his whisky again. "I knew you would take it the wrong way. I promise, Draco, I'm _fine_. In the grand scheme of life, not having someone trying to kill me on a daily basis is a lot more important to me than presents I never got."

Draco shook his head. He could speak past the block in his throat if he really tried, so he did it now. "But—what did you want? Can you think of what you wanted and they wouldn't get you? If you tell me, we can go and buy it right now."

Harry stood up and shook his head. "The things I wanted when I was a child aren't the things I want right now," he said, and he reached out and caught Draco's head and kissed him, hard enough to make Draco's mouth water. "Let's go home and take care of some of those things, yeah?"

Harry could pull him into going along with anything. Draco stood up, and lost his balance, and fell with Harry, as always.

But later that night, he lay awake beside him, staring at the ceiling, his eyes blinking hard and fast, partially to hold back his reaction at the image of a child watching another boy open a huge heap of gifts, none of which were for him, and partially to ease the endless rustling and bustling of his brain.

He had to make up for that, in some way. Had to show Harry that someone loved him _now_. Had to show Harry—and maybe other people, too, like himself—that their relationship was a loving and lasting one, not a one-night stand that repeated itself each night.

The problem was…

The problem was, he could think of only one thing that Harry didn't have right now, only one thing Harry lacked. Harry had always smiled when Draco asked questions during the eight months they'd been together, for his birthday or some other special occasion, and said that having Draco was enough.

Draco nibbled his lip. He knew what he wanted to give Harry. He thought Harry needed it. He just didn't know if Harry would agree.

Then he smiled slightly and turned so that his head rested beneath Harry's chin, closing his eyes as Harry's restless breath traveled in and out of his hair. _Well, there are lots of times when we don't agree _anyway.

* * *

"Draco! Where were you? I had to go ahead to dinner and make excuses to Ron and Hermione." Harry's voice was low, and Draco winced as he heard it, taking off his scarf and giving Harry a large and nervous smile. He hadn't meant to let time run away with him, and he always hated spending time without Harry, even if it would also have been time with Harry's friends.

"I'm sorry," Draco said, while behind him Kreacher darted back and forth from the front door to the drawing room in Grimmauld Place where they'd agreed to place the tree. Draco spoke rapidly, making sure that Harry's attention was on him and not Kreacher. "I just—I was shopping for my mother, you know. She's hard to buy a gift for." And that was true, although in this case Draco had bought the gift months before. He'd visited the jeweler to have the ring adjusted, though, so he could virtuously claim that as part of the truth.

Harry glared at him for a few seconds, then rolled his eyes and reached for his hand. "You didn't miss much," he admitted, which was a rare thing for him to say about dinner with his friends. "Ron said Hermione was pregnant the minute I walked in the door, and then Hermione scolded him for ruining the surprise, and then they spent the rest of dinner alternately bickering and holding hands."

He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes for a moment. Only when he looked at Draco did the smile become real. "Maybe they have something, about finding someone to fight with," he ended softly.

Draco leaned in and kissed him. Harry stood, rubbing one finger around the edge of his eye and making Draco fight not to close it. Draco relaxed when he heard Kreacher stop running back and forth. At least that part was done with now.

"Well, since I missed dinner, we can have a quiet evening alone," Draco said, tugging on Harry's hands. "While I eat dinner, and you drink some whisky. How about it?"

Harry hesitated. "I really should work on that paperwork I promised I would do for Kingsley…"

"Two days before Christmas?" Draco tugged harder on Harry's hands and put his best spoiled-little-boy whine in his voice. He knew that Harry _wanted _some excuse to take time off, and he would do for Draco what he wouldn't do for himself. "Come on, you _know _that he won't mind if you take a little longer to do it."

Harry blinked. Then he said, "You know what? You're right. I ought to have more time off." And he smiled.

Draco tried not to strut _or_ roll his eyes as they moved down the corridor to the drawing room with the tree. For one thing, telling Harry that he knew how much of Harry's ultra-serious manner towards paperwork was for show might send Harry right back to it. He was weird like that sometimes.

For another, he was breathing fast, and his tongue seemed to have increased in size in his mouth, his throat swelling shut. He had no time to be anything but nervous. The pride and exasperation battling in him fell away, and he found himself with his hands in the middle of Harry's back. He dropped them before he could _actually _shove Harry into the drawing room. Harry was entering in front of him, anyway.

Harry stopped, and stared. Draco stepped around him.

Kreacher had done exactly what Draco told him to. The presents, all wrapped in silver or green or red or gold paper, so that the room shone and glittered brilliantly from the reflection of the tree's fairy lights on the colors, lay around the room on chairs, and sat under the tree, and were cradled in its boughs, and dangled on strings from the ceiling, in the case of those gifts light enough to be held by them. Stepping into the room was like stepping into a treasure hoard, the way Draco had intended it should be.

Harry stood in front of him with his jaw agape, the fairy-light reflections gleaming on his teeth. Then he turned around and stared at Draco.

Draco put his head up. "You didn't get presents when you were a kid," he said. "So I got you some. All you could want." He gestured at the gifts and stood there with his hand out, too nervous to lower it.

"I told you you didn't need to," Harry whispered.

"But I wanted to," Draco said. "And I know that you want it, too." He moved forwards again, one hand lifted to interrupt the words he thought Harry would speak, which left him looking a little foolish when Harry didn't speak them. He swallowed and dropped his hand, and rushed on. "There's a hole left that your family can never fill. But I might, if you let me."

"You didn't get me just one thing."

Draco tried to read Harry's voice and face, and couldn't. Well, he had done this, and it was too late to hide it now. He straightened his shoulders and cleared his throat. He was going to have to be honest with Harry, which wasn't a new thing in their relationship, not at all, but still wasn't comfortable.

"That thing might be something you didn't want, or already had," Draco said. It was true; there were rooms in Grimmauld Place full of treasures he had never seen, and there might be anything more in Harry's vault. "Or you might think I was trying too hard to make up for one _specific _thing your family did, instead of all of it. There are lots of people who would say the Malfoys don't have compassion or common sense, and I couldn't stand to make you feel that way, not for one second. Well. What the Malfoys do have is money." He spread his hands wide and turned in a small circle. "Here's what money can buy."

Harry looked around again. Draco swallowed once more. There was such a strange and complex expression on his face, Draco could do nothing else.

But then Harry's face changed.

He smiled.

Draco sagged in relief, and then gasped as Harry stepped forwards and wrapped his arms around him. Harry's voice murmured, low, in his ear, and Draco found himself straining to hear every word, the way he only had once before, the night Harry whispered that he loved him.

"How did you know?" Harry said now, his voice lower, shyer, heart-deep, heart-full. "I wanted—I've _wanted _things like this, for so long. There were so many Galleons in my vault, more than I ever imagined. There was so much food at Hogwarts, more than I knew I could eat. I thought I'd got over that and I didn't want _so much _anymore, but that's a lie. I want more from you, all the time, and I wanted more Christmas presents the minute you mentioned it. But you're the only one who would have done this for me. _Thank _you."

He kissed Draco, and his hands struck deep into his hair, and Draco kissed him back, and they stood there in the middle of the presents with light all around them.

**The End.**


	4. Black House, Bright Memories

**Title: **Black House, Bright Memories

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco (mostly pre-slash)

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **Angst, eighth-year fic.

**Wordcount:** 5900

**Summary: **Draco expected to have a horrible time at Grimmauld Place with Harry Potter, but at least it would be better than staying at Hogwarts with professors who hated him. But he discovers that while houses might make a difference, Houses don't.

**Author's Notes: **Written for celestlyn, who gave me the prompt: _8th year-Harry asks Draco to Grimmauld Pl for the holidays when he finds out he will be alone._ There's fluff as well as angst.

**Black House, Bright Memories**

"Welcome to the home of your ancestors."

Draco dropped his bags in the entrance hall when he heard Potter announce that, more than half-tempted to turn around and walk out the door. Why should Potter get away with tormenting him when Draco had left him alone all year? He'd barely even _seen _Potter from the time Potter testified at his parents' trials and got his father two years in Azkaban instead of ten until the moment Potter walked up to him and invited him home over the holidays.

But then, he'd barely seen his mother, either. She had taken to sleeping in the Ministry, practically, so busy was she with petitions to release his father even earlier and making sure he had comforts in his cell that most of the prisoners didn't. It was the reason he would have spent Christmas alone if not for Potter; Narcissa had told him, the circles beneath her eyes and her hair both starting to go grey, that she wouldn't have time for a celebration.

_If not for Potter._

It seemed to Draco that too many things in his life came back to that one sentence, and he didn't like it.

"No, I didn't mean it sarcastically. You probably know a lot more about some of the artifacts here than I would."

Draco started and turned around. Potter was standing in the entrance of what looked like, form the counters Draco could see, a kitchen. He straightened up and gave Draco a quick smile that wasn't warm enough for Draco, that never _could _be warm enough.

"I hope—I mean, I know you suspect my motives," Potter continued quietly. "But I don't think anyone should be alone now."

"You were planning to be," Draco said, not knowing his voice would come out so accusing until he spoke. "None of your little friends are here, and I know they all looked shocked when you invited me."

"This is as much for me as for you," Potter said, without making clear how that could possibly be so. "Go on upstairs. I haven't really lived here since the end of the war, so you can have whatever room you want. Just keep away from the one at the end of the first floor corridor with the tapestry over the door."

Draco sneered. "Of sentimental value, is it?" It made sense that _some _things around here would be associated with Potter's godfather, despite his attempt to claim that he hadn't lived here. Draco didn't believe that, frankly. Who would let a house as big as this one just go all to rack and ruin without making some attempt to reclaim it?

"No, it bites," Potter said dryly. "But if you want to lose a finger or your nose, that's fine with me." And he turned around and walked into the kitchen, leaving Draco to decide if he believed him.

In the end, he chose not to challenge Potter's obvious mental instability, choosing a room that looked over a back garden which had definitely seen better days. Draco leaned his arms on the sill and looked down at the ragged, bleak grass. The color of the grass more or less matched the faded curtains on the windows, and the ashes in the fireplace, although a muttering house-elf soon appeared to attend to the hearth.

Draco sighed and sat down on the bed, which creaked ominously beneath him. _Why _had he agreed to come? He would have been better off in the empty Manor after all.

* * *

But that was before he woke and smelled the most delicious scent of breakfast frying. It smelled—Draco's nose worked as he hastily threw on a new shirt but kept the same trousers as yesterday—yes, of bacon, and eggs, and something thick and sweet that he hoped was marmalade. He loved it, but his mother never allowed him to have too much of it, claiming it was bad for his digestion, and he had to fight with other Slytherins for it at Hogwarts.

He went to the kitchen, expecting the sullen house-elf again, and that he would be able to just fill his plate and leave.

To his utter shock, it was Potter who was cooking, a ragged jumper with a large H on the front stretched over his chest and shoulders. His Muggle jeans were patched and torn. Draco wrinkled his nose, but had to admit that the food smelled delicious anyway. And there was a jar of marmalade on the table, which was already open.

The table set with _two _plates, Draco couldn't help but note.

"Take whatever you want to drink," Potter said, flapping his hand at a boiling kettle and a jug of water that sat on the counter. He spoke in a distracted tone, never taking his eyes off their breakfast. "I just have pumpkin juice myself."

That sounded good, but Draco would have had to ask Potter where it was, since he didn't see it, and he didn't want to speak. He folded his arms and sat down in the chair nearest the door. After he finished the breakfast, then he planned to bolt. Potter would either be glad to sit in silence or would try to _talk _to him, about inane things. Draco enjoyed neither prospect.

In the end, Potter gave a final tap with his wand to one of the pans, seemed satisfied with the result, and stepped back, pulling out a carafe of pumpkin juice from behind the container of water. He poured his own glass, which was over on the counter, full of the orange liquid, and turned around, floating the food behind him. Draco jerked his eyes away, but he didn't manage it fast enough.

There was a long pause. Then Potter said gently, "Malfoy, did you want some pumpkin juice?"

Why did he have to sound _that _way, as if Draco was a baby? Draco hunched his shoulders and didn't say anything.

There was a soft clink. Draco turned his head, sure it was just the food arriving, and that he should devour it as quickly as he could so he could go and hide himself in his room. God, what Potter must be _thinking _of him—

But no, it was the glass of pumpkin juice that Potter had previously poured. Draco stared at it, then at the second cup and the jug of juice Potter held in his hand. He still didn't say anything, keeping true to at least one part of his vow, but Potter must have felt the stare, because he shrugged and said, "I reckoned I'd give you my cup. That way you could be sure it wasn't poisoned or that I spit in it or something."

Draco started eating, because there was no other response to such a declaration, and a mouth full of food would at least give him an _excuse _for not talking.

Potter talked through breakfast, himself, but lightly and easily, and never in a way that made it seem as if he expected Draco to join in. He talked about his work in the garden behind the house, in a way that made Draco want to roll his eyes and give Potter a piece of his mind about how awful it looked. He talked about how he had decided not to be an Auror, that he wanted to repair things instead. He'd got quite good at Repairing Charms over the last year, he said.

Draco supposed that someone with as many broken limbs as Potter had probably suffered had a natural interest in that kind of thing, but wondered why he hadn't chosen to go after Healing instead. He longed to ask, but he did the heroic thing and enjoyed his breakfast in silence.

It was _good, _the bacon crisp, the eggs fluffy, the toast breaking in his mouth with a crunch, the marmalade fresh and sweet. Draco didn't have to pretend enjoyment, but he did pretend that he didn't see Potter looking his way with a little smile.

Potter stood up when they were both finished, took the dirty plates to the sink, and began washing. Without turning around, he said casually, "I'll be doing some more work in the garden later. You're welcome to join me."

Draco stood up and stalked out of the room without answering. Maybe they could share a breakfast without exploding at each other, but a situation that involved _dirt _and _heavy tools _and the chance for Potter to shove him into the one or brain him with the other? Was Potter insane? Draco knew he would be in danger the instant he opened his mouth, and the sight of Potter with dirt under his fingernails would be too great a temptation.

Of course, if Potter was insane, Draco might be in danger anyway.

He spent some time seriously considering the situation, lying on his bed and staring at his bedroom ceiling, and finally fell asleep in the middle of a Potions tome.

* * *

Draco leaned on the sill of his window and looked down into the garden. As Potter had promised, he was laboring there, and it seemed that he had to do most of the work by hand, since the plants weren't worth the magical exhaustion of charms. Draco shook his head at the sight of the shovel and the trowel and the bucket and other things whose names he didn't even know. Yes, he was well out of it.

"Master Draco Malfoy is being bored?"

Draco turned and looked down at the sullen house-elf, who looked back at him, and more or less hovered. Draco didn't know what to make of the strange creature. Yesterday, the elf had acted as if it could barely stand him, but it had started to dog his steps this morning, and asked questions about the fire and the bathwater. Draco had returned monosyllabic answers. He had to think the elf was a spy for Potter, and that Potter would attack the moment he found a weakness.

Because of course that was the reason Potter had invited him over. It _had _to be. In his own home, he could murder Draco privately and get rid of the body.

"Kreacher is knowing many remedies for boredom in the library," croaked the elf, still trying to look helpful.

Draco started. _That _name, he knew; his aunt had sneered and laughed about how she had tricked his cousin's house-elf into helping them decoy Potter, and ultimately destroy his godfather. "Are you bound to the house?" he asked cautiously. "Is that the reason Potter didn't destroy you?"

"Master Harry Potter is not destroying me," said Kreacher, looking down at his skinny arms with their thick black hairs as if he wanted to make sure they weren't disappearing. "Master Harry Potter is telling me not to be punishing myself." He sighed and looked wistfully at a deep scar in the wood at the base of Draco's wall. "Kreacher is obeying."

Draco wasn't sure he wanted to know where the scar came from, or what had caused it, but he _did _want to know what Kreacher was implying. "You mean that he _wants _you around?"

Kreacher gave him a wounded look. "Master Draco Malfoy is not wanting me around," he sniffled, shuffling towards the door. "Master Draco Malfoy is being like the old mistress. She be wanting Kreacher to go away and hurt himself." He brightened suddenly. "Master Draco Malfoy did not be making Kreacher promise not to hurt himself, yes?"

Draco shook his head. The last thing he wanted was to get in trouble with Potter for ordering his house-elf to roast its ears, or whatever other punishments his Black ancestors had thought appropriate. "It's just—I thought—that you because you betrayed his godfather, he wouldn't want you here."

Kreacher drew himself up. "I is being here," he said quietly. "Master Harry Potter is forgiving." And he turned and walked out.

Draco spent some more minutes looking down at Potter in the bleak garden. He continued to labor against soil that was obviously far less forgiving than he was, and in a way that made Draco itch to take his tools from him and show him the right spells.

_He might have done the best job he can. Imagine what the garden probably looked like before._

But that didn't change the fact that Potter was doing it incorrectly. And it didn't overcome Draco's urge to correct him.

He took a deep breath. If Potter could forgive a house-elf far more intimately involved in the death of someone he loved than Draco had ever been, it was _possible _that his invitation had been sincere and he wanted Draco there. Draco could go down and see, at least. And offer to help with the garden, while he was at it. At least he thought Potter probably wouldn't turn down free labor.

Potter did turn and stare so hard when Draco walked out into the garden that Draco thought he should scamper back inside. But then Potter grinned and shook his head so some sweat flew away and mingled with the rain that was beginning to fall. The idiot didn't even have an Impervious Charm.

"Decided you wanted to do a bit of honest work, huh?" Potter asked.

Draco stepped up beside him without answering that. "Use a bloody _spell_," he said, casting one that made the shovel Potter was lugging around start to dig on its own. "And get rid of those old dead roses, they aren't doing anything." He turned and cast a harsh spell at the thorny vines that were tangled around the remnants of what might have been a well, or just an old stone well. Who knew why his Black ancestors wanted to do anything in particular?

"There's a reason I—_don't_!"

Draco caught a glimpse of something moving as fast as the Dark Lord's snake sometimes had, and then Potter had knocked him onto the ground and was staring at him apologetically with eyes greener than the grass. The thing overhead retracted with a hiss and clatter.

"Sorry," Potter apologized. "I ought to have warned you how the roses react to magic."

* * *

"But it's _daft_," Draco said, gesturing so hard with the Firewhisky Potter had given him that some spilled on the carpet. Kreacher appeared, towel in hand, before Draco could even think of reaching for his wand to clean it up. Draco nodded and settled back into his chair. This was the way it should be, with him tended by house-elves and everything catering to his different and necessary whims. "Why would you bother changing the garden at all, when you realized there were spells to make you leave it alone? Why would my ancestors put those spells on the garden in the first place?"

Potter snorted into his own butterbeer. It passed Draco's understanding that Potter would have Firewhisky in the house and refuse to drink it himself, but he was reluctantly acknowledging that a great many of Potter's habits were hard for him to grasp.

Potter only looked simple on the surface. He was all kinds of complicated underneath, like the Four-Notched Rose leaves Professor Snape had shown Draco once, which were a plain green on top and incredibly branched and a panoply of colors on the underside.

Draco frowned accusingly at the Firewhisky. It wasn't doing its job and drowning his memory. Instead, it was making him think of all sorts of things that he _didn't want _to think of. Like Professor Snape. And roses, for that matter.

"I think they _were _daft," Potter said. "The whole lot of them. They thought it was a good idea to cut their house-elves' heads off after they died and display them in the ground floor corridor. For a long time, that was the fate Kreacher wanted. He was disappointed that he wasn't to be granted the honor of a glorious death." He sipped more butterbeer, watching Draco with an eager eye.

Draco was almost sorry to be performing to expectations, but on the other hand, there was no way he could react to that with anything other than disgust. "I'm sorry, _what_?"

Potter waved his hand. "Don't worry, we disposed of them a long time ago. I'm sure there aren't any in the house anymore." He paused thoughtfully. "Unless Kreacher kept them. He does that sometimes, you know. I want to get rid of curtains full of doxy eggs, and he keeps and treasures them as a priceless Black family heirloom." He grinned and once again watched Draco over the lip of the bottle.

Draco shuddered from the depths of his bones. He had never realized until now how much he valued cleanliness. It was hard to, when you were living in places where house-elves took care of it for you.

"I reckon you must think the same of me," he said. "Think I'm daft. Don't know why you invited me here, anyway."

A moment later, he examined the Firewhisky bottle suspiciously for signs of Veritaserum. It was _not _supposed to make him get all maudlin and sob on _Potter, _of all people, for sympathy.

Potter shrugged and looked uncomfortable. "Because no one should be alone on Christmas," he said. "And I thought you would want to come with me rather than stay there. I see the way the professors look at you. Not even McGonagall can hide it, and she bloody well _should, _when she could overlook me using the Cruciatus Curse in front of her."

Draco gaped at him. "You did _what_?"

"Well." Potter looked as if he was blaming his butterbeer for loosening his tongue, too. "Amycus Carrow was insulting her. So I cursed him."

"That's no reason for you to do that," Draco said, not sure whether he should be horrified or impressed. He took a healthy swig of his Firewhisky in lieu of having to decide. "_That's _one I didn't hear about in the papers."

Potter's smile was sad, or something like it. "Well, of course not. Wouldn't want the public troubled by revelations that Our Saintly Little Hero Harry Potter really isn't so saintly after all."

Draco tried to laugh, and ended up spraying most of the whisky on himself. He was reaching the stage of sloppy drunk that he had never been in before, except in front of Pansy and Blaise. He wondered if he should be uncomfortable that he was in it now in front of Potter, and could only find pride that he'd managed to use the right charm to clean the whisky off his clothes. Besides, Potter was grinning, and Draco was glad that they had avoided a moment of self-pity that could have tarnished his perception of Potter further.

"They don't really call you that," Draco said, shaking his head in the manner of one too wise to be taken in. "You're making that up."

Potter pressed a hand over his heart. "No. I'm not making it up. There was an article after the war that called me that. Only one, thank God. I hate to think of the trend it could have started."

"You really hate it," Draco said, and wagged the bottle at him. "I hadn't thought of you as doing that, but you do."

"Yes, I hate the attention," Potter said, and swallowed more butterbeer. Draco reckoned Potter was starting to get a little drunk after all, to keep Draco company. Maybe he'd sneaked some Firewhisky when Draco wasn't looking, or charmed the butterbeer to have alcohol. "And I hate the way that people used to offer their children to me one minute and then look askance at me the next, all because of something the _Daily Prophet _said."

"Then we have something in common!" Draco said triumphantly. He had to pause and consider it. "Well, I liked the times when they all turned on you and hated you. That was kind of fun. And no one ever came up with insults for you as good as the ones I did."

"We still have something in common," Potter echoed him, and they leaned forwards to clink their bottles together.

* * *

Draco looked at the neatly-wrapped package, in the blue and silver paper that his mother had always favored. Then he looked at the note again, the single short letter that had accompanied it, the only communication he'd had with his mother since he came to stay in Grimmauld Place.

_Dear Draco, I can't get you much this year, and I feel it best that we not spend the holidays together. I'm sure you understand._

_ Love, Mummy._

Draco closed his eyes and crumpled the note up, twist by twist, until a very small crumb was left that he set fire to. There was no point in keeping it, or leaving it about for the nosy Kreacher to find.

He understood, yes. His mother was spending all their money on a new trial, and bribes, trying desperately to get his father out of Azkaban before despair killed him. Draco found it selfish to object in the face of how hard she was working, and the thought of how petty he would feel demanding her attention oppressed him.

But _damn _it, he had still hoped for a little more acknowledgment from her than this.

"Is something wrong?"

Potter, leaning around the door of his bedroom. Draco thought he could have coped with Kreacher right now, but he definitely couldn't cope with Potter seeing him like this. He hastily stuffed the package away and turned around, shaking his head as he mopped at his cheeks and the tears that were still on them. When had he started crying? He didn't know. He tried to concentrate more on the irritating itching feeling the tears gave him than anything else. "Nothing is," he said harshly.

Potter said nothing, only looked at him and at the gift that Draco had put on the bed, and then nodded to himself. "Come on," he announced. "We're going to Diagon Alley today."

Draco stared at him. "Why?" Potter had seemed content to remain in the house and never go anywhere, except out for an evening at the Weasleys' now and then, probably because of his own fans.

"Because how else am I going to get you a Christmas gift?" Potter asked, cocking his head and widening his eyes.

Draco gratefully forgot what his mother had said in his ancient quarrel with Potter. "You're not supposed to _tell _someone what you're getting them for Christmas, you git. It's supposed to be a surprise." He thought of adding, but did not, that Potter obviously had no manners, not surprising with the way he'd been raised. Something about the way Potter hinted around his Muggle family told Draco that mentioning them might ruin more than he wanted to ruin.

Potter grinned at him. "But I have no idea what you would like, and rather than risk getting you something you don't want, I'm going to go and get you what you _do _want." He reached out and took Draco's hand, pulling him along. "Come on."

* * *

Draco had sometimes—not often, at least not that he would admit to himself outside the private world of his curtained bed at Hogwarts—been jealous of Potter's friends. He had wondered what it would be like to be pulled along by that kind of whirlwind force, jollied and chivvied and involved in adventures. Paid attention to.

Now he knew. It was bloody exhausting, that was what it was.

They went inside at least thirteen shops, had at least twelve conversations about what Draco wanted, traded eleven sets of insults, rejected ten compromises that Potter didn't want to make and Draco plain didn't want, tried on nine sets of clothes, scandalized eight mothers doing holiday shopping with small children, ate seven small meals, discussed gravely six times whether Draco needed an owl, and came out, in the end, with five gifts for Draco. Draco stared at them in Potter's arms and shook his head.

A soft grey jumper, made of the silky sort of material that he liked but which his mother didn't buy for him because _she _disliked it and so thought Draco must. A pair of dress robes Draco could wear at Hogwarts without embarrassment. A small, slender holster for his wand that would fit comfortably under his sleeve without making a huge bulge outside it. A silver watch-chain that he had merely liked the look of.

And a silver watch, making a soft ticking noise to itself, with a face so luminous it looked like quartz. Draco held it for a long time after Potter announced he was going to buy it, listening to it in the foreground, in part to keep from listening to Potter's row with the shopkeeper in the background.

And to keep his stupid tears at bay.

Potter panted beside him now like a puppy, grinning as they headed back to the Apparition point. "It was worth it, wasn't it?"

Draco blinked and glanced at him. There was a tone in Potter's voice he didn't understand.

He did when his eyes alighted on him, though. Potter wanted to give Draco things he wanted. But he was afraid of imposing, afraid that Draco might have resented the stares and hisses in his direction more than he appreciated the gifts.

Draco smiled. "It was worth it," he said, and watched Potter light up like a sun coming from behind a cloud.

* * *

Draco hesitated for a long time before he called Kreacher up to his room. Potter had bought him Christmas gifts, and although Draco didn't have any money, it was only right that he return the favor. But his would be a surprise, the way _proper _Christmas gifts always were.

Kreacher appeared in his room and looked anxiously about, as though he assumed Draco would have him clean the walls and remove heirloom dust. Then he relaxed and faced Draco. "Yes, Master Draco Malfoy is wanting?" he asked.

Draco smiled. "I want to know what kind of biscuits Harry—Potter likes best." He told himself that he had only used that name because he wasn't about to call him "Master"the way Kreacher did, but there was a thick feeling in his throat that told him otherwise. He swallowed determinedly, and it went away.

"They are being small and white and fuzzy with chocolate in the middle!" Kreacher said, and bounced up and down. Draco sincerely hoped that "fuzzy" meant sugar was on the top instead of mold. "Master Draco Malfoy is wanting me to make these biscuits for Master Harry Potter?"

Draco shook his head. "No, I want you to teach me how to make them."

* * *

Draco stepped back from the distinctly Muggle oven and mopped his brow. It had taken him far longer to calm Kreacher down—he had threatened to jump from the top of the house when he heard that Draco intended to bake on his own—than it had to extract the recipe or make it. Now it only ought to take twenty minutes or so, if Kreacher was right, and then the biscuits would be done.

And Draco would have something for Potter that he had made himself.

The thought pricked him in odd places. He knew some of his friends had delighted in making presents for their parents, but they were good with certain specific charms that made neat stitches in clothing or fastened bits of metal and jewels together, and there was certainly nothing as mundane as baking involved. He knew that Pansy had made a special kind of toast for her mother one year, but that showed how skillful she was in ordering the house-elves about, not what her hands could do.

Draco himself, and his parents, had always preferred bought presents. Who wouldn't? They were delicate and beautiful, and they did what you wanted them to, and there was no time wasted trying to clean up a mess or decide on the best method of doing something. The thrill was in the surprise.

This time, though—

Well, Potter had done one non-traditional thing. Two, if you counted inviting Draco to his house in the first place. So it was okay for Draco to do something non-traditional in return. Potter would probably even appreciate it, Gryffindor sop that he was.

Draco did have to go upstairs and make sure his mother's gift was ready to send. There was only one rather grumpy owl that came around Grimmauld Place, that Harry—_Potter _had borrowed from one of Weasley's brothers. When Draco had asked why Potter didn't have an owl of his own anymore, Potter had said, "Because I don't," and then hadn't spoken for half a day. So Draco had decided not to ask.

He'd got his mother a delicate silver necklace with an emerald at the end of it, bought by means of a loan from Blaise. Draco turned it over and stared at it. It would almost make a better present for Potter, because of his eye color.

But Draco shook his head then. Potter wouldn't know how to appreciate it, wouldn't know how to take care of jewelry. Draco had certainly never seen him wear any, outside of a rather battered watch. And this was too delicate, meant for a woman's neck instead of Potter's strong one.

Draco shut his eyes. He didn't want to think about that. He hastily got his package together and told the owl where to go.

He was so successful in not thinking about what he didn't want to think about that it wasn't until he smelled burning that he remembered the biscuits.

* * *

Draco ran into the kitchen, and stared. The smoke was already clearing out, thanks to the efficient and competent way Kreacher had reacted, but the smell still lingered, and his biscuits sat on top of the counter.

They were _completely _ruined. Draco found it hard to contemplate how they might have been worse unless he was calling on the Dark Lord for assistance. Their shapes were as twisted as a unicorn's horn, and great masses of sticky chocolate bound them to the pan Draco had used. The smell was worse when he stepped towards them, so that Draco flinched and halted at a distance far more from that than from the heat.

"Is something wrong?"

Draco turned around. Potter stood behind him, his gaze going in a puzzled fashion from the biscuits to Draco's face.

"Have you started burning food, Kreacher?" Potter added, and then said no more than that, probably because he knew the way a house-elf would start wailing and beating his head against the wall if he was scolded. But he did come into the room shaking his head and waving his hand in front of his nose.

Kreacher started to mutter anyway, but it was low-level enough Draco could have ignored it. He couldn't stand for Potter to find out later that he was the one responsible by questioning Kreacher, though. Potter would think him a coward again, and that was intolerable.

_Why should it be?_

_ You know the answer to that._

Draco sighed and said, "It wasn't him. It was me. I asked him for instructions on baking your favorite biscuits, and I—forgot about them. This is what happened."

Potter turned towards him with his eyebrows raised and his teeth showing between parted lips. Then he said, "What—why would you want to do that?"

Draco glared and folded his arms. He always _had _found it easier to deal with Potter when he could get angry at him. "What the bloody hell do you _think _I'm doing, Potter?" he snapped. "I wanted to make a Christmas gift for you, but I don't have any money. This was supposed to be a surprise, but I ruined it, and you ruined it by coming into the kitchen, and I hope you're happy now."

He turned his back and stood there, staring at the far wall and fuming. But he didn't walk out of the kitchen and up to his bedroom, where he knew Potter wouldn't have followed him. Perhaps he was hoping for something.

He got it when Potter put his hand on his shoulder sand said gently, "Thank you for the thought. But there's something you can give me that would please me just as much."

Draco turned his head slowly to peer at him. It wouldn't be the same, he thought mulishly, because this time it wouldn't be a surprise, but at least it would be equal to the gifts Potter had bought him, that way. "What?" he asked.

"This," Potter said, and moved nearer, and then nearer, so slow and gentle and considerate that Draco knew exactly what was going on and could have backed away if he wanted to. It _figured _that Potter would be this sweet and this much of a Gryffindor about something so simple.

But Draco stood still, and perhaps even arched his chin forwards at the last minute to make the kiss a little faster, although no one watching could have told that.

They kissed for quite some time, until Draco forgot all about the smoke of the burned biscuits in the air, and Kreacher's muttering had faded. That might have been because he'd left; he was certainly nowhere in sight when Draco could lift his head from the miracle of Potter's mouth and blink around.

"You're all right now?" Potter said, lifting his head, too, and raking his fingers casually through some of his hair. Then Draco saw his hand shaking and realized he wasn't very casual after all, and suddenly, the smugness that filled him was overwhelming, almost choking, and he felt very much as he would have if he had managed to bake the biscuits and pack and wrap them without Potter suspecting. Only better.

"I am," Draco said, and reached out to slide an arm around Potter's neck—well, he supposed he ought to say _Harry's _neck—and bring him back in again. "As soon as you kiss me some more."

Potter's overwhelming grin of delight was almost the better gift, but not quite.

* * *

Narcissa's gift turned out to be a pair of grey trousers that complemented his grey jumper from Harry nicely. And Harry had kept one gift back, after all, and held out a spare watch chain, this one with an emerald at the end of it, the Slytherin House colors, and Harry's.

They kissed on a thick, warm rug, with a blazing fire on the hearth, and candles shining everywhere around them, and dark memories fled in the face of the light.

**The End.**


	5. This Old Darkness

**Title: **This Old Darkness

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Angst, crossdressing, drunken sex.

**Wordcount:** 2100

**Summary: **They meet for the first time when it seems like they've met many times before. Neither of them is sure why they're doing this, but they know they need it.

**Author's Notes: **Another of my Advent fics, written for thrilladdict's prompt: _Harry/Draco Hurt/Comfort and First Time with DrunkLonely!Harry and CrossdressingTroubled!Draco_. I think the fic fulfills both spirit and letter of the prompt, though with perhaps more hurt than comfort until the very end.

**This Old Darkness**

"This is it."

Harry kept his voice low as he flicked the light on. It was a Muggle light, the way this was a Muggle flat, and he knew what Malfoy would think of it, could almost feel the words boiling up behind his teeth.

Except, when he turned around, Malfoy was standing there in the fucking _dress _that Harry had first seen him at the pub in. It floated around him, as white as a bride's dress, with a long skirt and a bodice that…Harry had never been able to decide in the pub, and he couldn't even now with his brighter light on, if there were little bows and decorations worked into the cloth there, or not.

He knew that it made Malfoy look _strange. _Not weird, which would have been the first word Harry used if someone described Malfoy in a dress to him. But strange, displaced, moving around in a different sort of world. Harry found himself looking into Malfoy's eyes and finding them pale instead of grey. Not any color, just pale.

"You're a bit pissed," Malfoy said. His voice was colorless, like his eyes. He took off the small jacket he'd wrapped around his shoulders to keep the cold off and hung it up on a hook, looking at Harry all the while. The flat wasn't much to look at, Harry supposed. Plain white walls and plain white floor and a small kitchen off to the side.

The bedroom was behind that.

Harry licked his lips, and licked them again. He wondered if he'd left dirty clothes lying on the floor, dirty blankets lying on the bed. It seemed likely he had. He didn't know what to do about that. "More than a bit," he ended up saying, because it was the only thing that made sense.

And Malfoy just nodded seriously, as if it made more sense than Harry knew, and then moved forwards, putting his mouth up to be kissed.

It was so _obvious _that that was what he was doing, Harry just went with it. He leaned down and kissed Malfoy, finding his lips dry and sweet. Well, he'd been eating biscuits out of a basket he brought with him, and hadn't stopped even when Harry sat down next to him and tried to talk to him about Hogwarts. In fact, he hadn't wanted to talk about Hogwarts at all, just shrugged and kicked his heels out, spreading the dress as if to draw attention to his thin body beneath it.

Malfoy's hands closed on his shoulders, and Harry reminded himself, again, that the person he was thinking about was right here in front of him, and probably resented being totally dismissed. He closed his hands on Malfoy's shoulders right back, and then hesitated, aware of the thin fabric of the dress crumpling beneath them.

"Oh, _fuck _it," Malfoy said, and did some kind of complicated twist and motion, which probably involved his wand, that Vanished the dress. Harry blinked as he got a look at what Malfoy wore beneath it: these sheer _things _on his legs that Harry couldn't name, and a dab of makeup here and there, color on his arms, as though it was more important to smooth down and powder up the things someone else couldn't see.

Malfoy gave his head a toss, his face still glinting and strange, though that might be because of the glow of powder on his cheekbones, and his hair, Harry noticed for the first time, styled in this unearthly way that made it short from the back but longer from the front, and with a bit of curl to it. "Are we doing this or not?" Malfoy snapped.

Harry looked at the scars on Malfoy's chest—longer, darker, deeper than the ones that would have come from the _Sectumsempra_ Curse—and nodded. He was hungry, for the first time in a long time, for something other than the love he couldn't find. Maybe this would be all right, for just one night. Maybe it would satisfy the craving.

He moved forwards and wrapped his arms around Malfoy's waist, kneeling down in front of him. Malfoy shuddered and shut his eyes, and didn't look when Harry took his cock out of its complicated packaging, a wrap of cloth that Harry suspected concealed the bulge better than just women's clothes would have.

He didn't know what Malfoy wanted, who he was. He didn't know why he was wearing this, or why it _attracted _Harry to him instead of drove him away, or why he had decided that tonight of all nights was the time to break his personal rule about not having sex just because he wanted it.

But it was okay, it was all right, and if Malfoy wanted to conceal his cock he didn't seem to be ashamed of it; he was groaning and moaning above Harry right now, spreading his legs and thrusting it forwards. Harry carefully licked his teeth, hoping to remove of some of the mustiness of the alcohol, and then leaned forwards and took it into his mouth.

Malfoy thrust deep at once, and never did let Harry up. Harry just rode with it, his body still limp and relaxed enough from the alcohol that Malfoy never needed to stop to keep from choking him. His mouth was open, the strings of saliva running down the sides of his cheeks, and Malfoy moaned as if it was the best thing he'd ever felt.

Harry gazed up at him. From this angle, Malfoy was even stranger, because Harry could see the stubble on his chin and the way that he'd carefully scraped it away from his throat, how he wore no false breasts but the light scratches from the strained bodice were still on his skin, how the scars ran around Malfoy in lines and at angles that Harry knew from experience would be difficult for an attacker to do to you unless they held you down—

Malfoy cursed and tugged him up. Harry rose, letting Malfoy spill out of his mouth so that he could go on looking. There was a scar on Malfoy's chin, too, and he reached out and scrubbed it up and down with his finger.

Malfoy cursed again and said, "We're going to bed." And he turned and hauled Harry there, and Harry tried his best to help, although he still stumbled because he couldn't help it.

Harry's bed was the same as always, small and cotton-sheeted and dusty, but Malfoy acted as though he didn't notice any of that. He threw Harry on the bed and gestured at his clothes. "Take them off."

Harry did, while Malfoy just watched him. Harry nodded at the silk things on his legs. "Aren't you going to take—those off?" He didn't want to reveal that he didn't know the name. Malfoy's eyes had narrowed enough with the way he stumbled over his words.

Malfoy's eyes narrowed further. "I never do."

Harry just had time to murmur some apology before Malfoy leaned over and kissed him. It was burning, bright, best, bursting, and Harry hummed and opened his mouth, and Malfoy climbed on top of him, smushing him into the bed and driving all the breath out of his lungs.

Malfoy was always _there_, it seemed, on top him and shifting around like a python just when Harry had got comfortable, as heavy and as awkward. The silk things on his legs scratched, and when he lay down on top of Harry and arranged himself so that his cock was pointing more or less the right direction, his scars scratched. Harry craned his head back to breathe, and Malfoy jerked his head away, frowning.

"Your breath is _foul_, Potter."

Harry muttered some apology and picked up his wand. Malfoy lay back down, muttering, and Harry cast a quick Freshening Charm on his breath and then reached for the bedroom table. He'd had lube in there, the last time he looked. Not that he brought home men that often, but sometimes his hand needed the company.

There was silence between them as Malfoy prepared him, and Harry occupied it with staring at his scars. He jumped when Malfoy glanced up and caught him at it. Malfoy just shook his head and exhaled heavily, as though Harry was annoying him more than he'd expected with the way he couldn't stop staring.

"Not all of them are from the war," he said.

"I know," Harry said, and then clamped his mouth shut, because the look Malfoy was giving him told him too well that he knew nothing, at all.

Malfoy's fingers were slick when they slid into him, but not comfortable. They went too deep to be comfortable, and they were too long, and Harry fussed under his breath and Malfoy told him to hush. But they were there, and Harry at last closed his eyes and relaxed around them.

Predictably, that got him pinched on the cheek by Malfoy. "Open your eyes," he demanded, rising above Harry and positioning himself all over again. "I don't fancy being with someone who doesn't want to _see _me."

Harry would have said something, but Malfoy slid into him, and he lost the breath to say anything, at all.

Malfoy was like a dancer when he fucked, and some of that had to do with the glitter on his cheeks and the curled hair and some didn't. There was his grace, and Harry reached up and cupped his hip, remembering his grace on a broom at Hogwarts and wanting to steal some of that for himself. It seemed most of the time that there was no grace left to him, not here, not now.

He realized he was crying, tears sliding down his cheeks, and Malfoy hissed at him again and bent down to kiss him. His mouth was fresher than Harry's, cool, salty. Harry kissed him again and again until Malfoy pulled back and shuddered.

That was what made Harry come, and he did it in utter surprise, thrusting up and back down again, making the bed creak and rock, and Malfoy flop on top of him. He didn't think he had even been touched on the cock. But with someone like Malfoy, that didn't matter.

Malfoy pulled out of him. Harry curled up, ready for Malfoy to leave. They all did, everyone he brought home.

But Malfoy only pushed at him until he uncurled again, which made Harry think that he must be lying on top of a piece of Malfoy's clothing. Instead, Malfoy grumbled at him and closed his eyes, saying tiredly, "I'm going to stay the night, and your breath is going to be fresh and your face is going to be _dry _when I wake up in the morning."

Harry blinked at him, and reached out to touch Malfoy's shoulder. Malfoy shoved into him like a cat impatient to be petted. Harry did it, for a while, until Malfoy pointedly reached down and tugged the blankets up over them, binding Harry's hand to his side and making him stop.

Harry curled up next to him and blinked some more.

Everyone left. Ginny had, and the boyfriend he'd had after her, and then the next girlfriend, and then Cho, when they made that disastrous attempt to get back together. It was just the way things were. Harry would wake up the darkness after fucking and know it for old and familiar—not a friend, but an acquaintance so well-known that he could no longer mistake the shape of it.

But this…

Harry looked down, and saw another scar he hadn't noticed before on Malfoy's softened, slack face, this one curving around his right ear and up. It looked like the marks of teeth, if teeth chewed in a perfectly half-circular shape.

Harry reached down and petted Malfoy's hair again, then reached up to his own lips and felt the lipstick on them.

This could be all right.

**The End.**


	6. Bells to the Wild Sky

**Title: **Bells to the Wild Sky

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Some angst, far-future established relationship

**Wordcount: **1990

**Summary: **Harry and Draco, on the New Year's Eve of their thirtieth year together, look back on the changes in the wizarding world.

**Author's Notes: **Written for the prompt given to me by vaysh11, with the summary pretty much a restatement of her prompt. The title is taken from Tennyson's _In Memoriam: _"Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky."

**Bells To the Wild Sky**

They sat on a hill high above the glittering lights of Londinium, and looked down on them. Now and then, Draco's hand would reach out and touch Harry's. Harry touched back, and smiled with both his lips and his eyes.

Draco watched him thoughtfully, wondering if Harry knew what that smile meant to him. Thirty years together, thirty years tonight, and still, sometimes he didn't think he had the words for the emotions. Or perhaps it was that the emotions grew deeper and deeper the more time they spent together, so that it was like trying to put a bridge across a river that continually carved a new bed.

"Do you think we should go to bed?" Harry's voice was soft and hoarse, a legacy of the scar that twisted gently across his throat. Draco reached up and traced the scar, and Harry leaned back towards him, smiling. Draco leaned in to kiss the scar, and Harry tilted his head back and gasped, then swore as his knee popped.

"You're just a mess," Draco said, knowing that he would get away with the teasing, though he was perhaps the only one in the wizarding world, either the way it was now or the way it had been, who could.

"Messes need cleaning up," Harry disagreed, drawing Draco onto him with his eyes as much as his hands and voice. "And I just need fucking."

Draco kissed his face, his eyelids, the scar on his fingernails, the marks of old burns on his forearms, where someone had taken him and marked him with the Dark Mark, and Draco, in a rage, had cast a spell that burned it off again. Harry arched his neck in a mute plea, and Draco prepared him with a shaking wand.

They went slowly after that, though, partially because they had to pause and cast Warming Charms that kept wearing off due to the intense cold around them, and then more charms to protect against the snow that began to fall, and partially because if they went fast, they could no longer recover as fast at fifty-one as they had at twenty-one. But Harry still sighed when Draco slid into him, and it was still as much of a challenge as it had ever been to make him do more, say more, _be _more. Draco rocked into him, and Harry rocked back, emphasizing with sharp thrusts of his hips that he was there, still, smooth, real, scarred, pitted, by no means fragile.

Draco shut his eyes, listening to the distant bells as they began to toll the New Year. It seemed fitting to him that they should be hearing it as they fucked, as they celebrated their relationship, as they made their commitment to each other new again.

He could pretend it was the same bells that had brought them together if he listened, although those New Year's Eve bells had rung not to celebrate the cycle of time but to announce that their worst fears had come true, and the Muggles had discovered who wizards were and a way into the wizarding world.

He and Harry had both come back to Hogwarts after three years of denial that they needed to finish up something at that place, and had stumbled out of their rooms into the same corridor, gasping and red-eyed. They'd stared at each other, and then run for the Great Hall, where McGonagall's enhanced voice was summoning the students, explaining what had happened, and enjoining them to be calm.

Of course no one was calm by the time she finished explaining, and the Great Hall was filled with wailing, as though the slaughter had already begun. Draco had turned his head, and Harry was there, and his eyes were so killingly determined that Draco could feel himself nodding back. Together, they moved together, and provided a solid wall for the first-years to lean against, while they used their own enhanced voices to explain that no one should panic, and they had plans for defending the school.

They didn't have plans, yet. But they were the only young survivors of the war there, and the only ones who knew what this might mean—the only ones able to draw on resources of adrenaline and reserves of strength that seemed to have been lying dormant all those years they resisted the call of Hogwarts, and fling themselves back into battle.

Then Harry's nails cut into his hips, and Draco sagged forwards and gave in with more hammering thrusts, and the memories broke apart like the salt that the Muggles had scattered on the site of Hogwarts—what they_ thought_ of as Hogwarts. He leaned his head on Harry's shoulder and breathed, in and out.

They had started to work together on that distant New Year's Eve, and perhaps it was true, the old idea that whatever you did on the eve of the year, you would be doing the rest of the year. And they had never stopped.

Draco smiled, kissed the side of Harry's neck, and reached down to stroke him off. It took him longer and not as long, and he groaned and sighed and released while Draco held him, and watched fireworks rising up above Londinium, casting their light over its shining, twisted streets, not easy for any marching army to find their way along, but perfect for the dancing that filled them now.

* * *

Harry opened his eyes and grinned. Draco was watching the celebrations. Well, even after thirty years to get used to them, it still wasn't entirely familiar, Harry reckoned. He stroked the back of Draco's neck and hummed to him, while his mind filled with his own memories, of the night that they had used the Great Spell that separated the Muggle and wizarding worlds again.

He and Draco had been the centers, the conduits, the controls. It was the only way the Great Spell would work; it was the only way a spell could become a Great Spell, really. There had to be someone at the center of it, a single person who would sacrifice their life and magic to it, or a powerful pair who trusted each other completely.

If it had been three, Harry would have stood with Ron and Hermione. But it was two, and he had turned and drawn Draco into the middle of the circle before anyone could voice a different suggestion.

They had stood there, in the dark, on the damp grass, their hands resting on each other's shirt fronts, with Draco's eyes so bright and expectant that it was hard to bear the weight of his gaze. Harry had kissed him once, the conclusion they had been moving towards even if it hadn't been until tonight that they reached it, and they had stepped away from each other and held hands.

The other wizards involved chanted around them. Hermione, with her face streaked with tears; she hadn't been able to convince her parents to come into the wizarding world with her. Ron, his hands steadier than they had been since before Fred's death. McGonagall, giving all her heart to this next phase of battle. Even Narcissa Malfoy, her voice low and exquisitely modulated, and the power swelling all around her as though it didn't want to be left out.

And in the center with Harry and Draco was the Mirror of Erised, the inspiration and anchor of the spell. When the moment came that the spell was to take effect, Harry and Draco had turned together and cast the magic straight into the center of the glass, their reflections showing their wand movements and their parted lips and their flicking wrists. At the moment, there was no other place that either of them would rather be.

The spell flared deep in the heart of the mirror, white and glass and gold. There was a confused sensation when Harry felt as if he were being ripped apart, doubled.

And so they separated the wizarding world from the Muggle world, creating an image of their desire and channeling all of the places and people and things they wanted into that: Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, their friends and families, the Ministry, Quidditch rules, the intense darkness of the Forbidden Forest and the intense lucidity of Dumbledore's tomb.

Except, when they opened their eyes in the new world, the reflection of what had been set free from the tyranny of what was and able to stand on its own, they found they had done more than that. They had created something _more_, drawing on the dreams and hopes of every wizard in Britain, including the children—and all the magical creatures.

A reflection of London lay in this new world, a place where all could walk and fear no Muggle, an expansive city with places waiting for them to enter to sleep and buy and talk and eat and live. They had called it Londinium after a city that had once been, that had changed and grown into something else. It seemed only right to call this graft from the same root by an older name.

And there were meadows no wizard could enter where unicorns galloped free, and a larger and deeper Forbidden Forest where centaurs told the stars, and a deep band of blue-green ocean encircling this new isle of Britain where merfolk swam. A variation of Wolfsbane that eased the pain of transformations and promised to eliminate them finally if taken long enough. A Malfoy Manor with rooms where Voldemort had walked transfigured into different ones.

A Godric's Hollow with an unbroken cottage in the center of it, and no war memorial.

They had begun their lives then, in this place that was not a new world but was more that than anything else, and it was where they had lived since.

Harry turned his head again. The bells had fallen silent, and so had the fireworks, and there was only the dancing left now, tangled chains of bodies moving through the streets, hands waving and feet stamping and voices shouting.

He would be the last to proclaim that the changes they had inflicted on the wizarding world were the best course. He wished he could have sought some other way, that they could have lived with the Muggles.

He would be the last to say that their reflection was perfect.

But it was theirs, and it was very grand and good if it was not perfect, a gift of heart's desire. It was not the mirror's fault, not the image's fault, if one's desires changed later but the image remained fixed.

_And in one thing, at least, _Harry thought, turning his head and focusing on Draco, _my desire will never change._

"Again?" Draco asked, turning to look at him. His face was bright with weariness and excitement, his hair paler than ever with the white that had begun to thread through it. The fingers he held out to Harry had more calluses and spots than before, and more broken fingernails, and were stronger than ever.

"This, again," Harry said, and sat up, and kissed him.

Below them, in the city they had helped to create, one more bell rang, and was silent. On the hill, they stepped into the New Year without stepping, they glided, they sat, and they smiled against each other's lips.

**The End.**


	7. His Refuge

**Title: **His Refuge

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Snape/Harry/Draco

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Angst, AU in that Snape survived the war.

**Wordcount:** 2600

**Summary: **Harry never expected to end up like this, and he still feels insecure about how it happened, sometimes. Severus and Draco have a little more faith in their choices.

**Author's Notes: **Written as an Advent fic for robinellen, who gave me the prompt: _I__'d love a Harry/Snape/Draco with an insecure!Harry struggling with holiday blues and his place in the threesome (happy ending, of course, hehe). _Happy ending provided! But we do have to get through some angst first, poor Harry.

**His Refuge**

Harry stood in silence by the fire, turning some Floo powder over and over in his fingers. In the end, he lowered his hand and let the powder dribble through his fingers back into the bowl they kept on the mantle.

Draco had said Harry could come to the Manor. Had said it several times, in fact. Casually five days ago, when he was looking at himself in the mirror to make sure that his hair was perfect for his next appearance in court. Less casually two days ago, when he had had Harry in a corner with his hands wound in his hair, and Harry was kissing him hard enough that he'd _hoped _Draco wasn't thinking about anything else. Least casually of all when he and Severus were standing next to the fireplace in holiday robes, and the bowl of powder Harry had just touched was in his hands.

But Harry saw too much. He saw the way his own dress robes made him look like a scarecrow. It wasn't that Draco, who had chosen them, had picked colors that didn't suit Harry; Harry knew the royal blue was supposed to make him appear dashing. But he didn't have the right build for them, and the robes hung off his shoulders and puddled around his feet and especially dangled around his skinny, bony wrists. It wasn't a conscious unkindness.

Neither were the darting glances Narcissa Malfoy gave him every time they met. Harry wondered if she knew she was giving them, in fact. But Harry saw too much, and he saw this, too. He saw the way her lips wrinkled when she extended her hand to him, and the way she smiled involuntarily when she firecalled the other day and Harry said he wouldn't be coming to her annual Christmas dinner.

She didn't look the same way at Severus, even though Severus was as halfblooded as Harry was, and as male. (Harry shifted a little, distracted by the thought of how male Severus was). It was—Harry was just too much, he thought. Severus fit the black dress robes, he knew the right way to behave, he hadn't _exactly _fought on the wrong side of the war. Harry's presence at Draco's side made Narcissa think of too many things she would rather forget, especially at this time of year, when nothing more strenuous than the arrangement of decorations and the buying of gifts should occupy her attention.

So Harry stayed behind. And Draco and Severus had both stared at him, although Severus had looked away first, his lips clamping down on the words that might have escaped them otherwise, his head moving in a curt nod before he took the powder from Draco and cast it in. They looked perfect.

And they didn't _see._

Harry moved away from the fireplace at last, deeper into the house the three of them shared. Three floors above the ground one, enough for each of them to have their own space when they were getting on each other's nerves, but it was to the bedroom they shared on the ground floor that Harry went, to sit on the edge of the bed and trail his hand over the sheets.

The sheets were so soft and smooth that Harry sometimes slid off them when they were making love on top of them. And sometimes they stained with blood from the scratches that he inflicted on Draco's back, and sometimes they dripped with liquids spilled from Severus's careless fingers, and sometimes Harry woke up to find his head mashed into the pillow and his face dangling over the edge, unable to move with two snoring weights behind him.

Harry closed his eyes and shook his head, then buried his face once in the pillow where Draco usually slept, once in the pillow where Severus slept.

They didn't see that, either. They saw Harry touching their cloaks sometimes when he passed the front door, or pausing in the doorway of their labs—Severus's Potions lab, Draco's spell creation lab—because he wanted to absorb the atmosphere coming out of those rooms, holy and strong and secret, and they mocked him for it. Most of the time, Harry didn't mind that. If he was as sensitive to mockery now as he was when he was a child, he would never have chosen _these _two men as his lovers.

But now, he had to wonder. If they were blind to so much of what mattered to him, and if they could go to the Manor together without him (and to gatherings of Draco's friends now married, and to gatherings of Potions teachers and spell creators, and to clandestine meetings of former Death Eaters who would offer each other help in surviving in this changed world) and be happy, what place did he have here?

Harry sighed and straightened up from the bed. This realization had been coming for a long time. He had done his best to put it off, but now it was here.

He was an Auror, but Draco and Severus had never been subtle with their suggestions that he quit. They had no idea what he would do afterwards, and Harry liked his job, but they didn't understand why he wanted to risk his life.

He was immersed with the Weasleys at birthday parties and Christmas celebrations, but Draco and Severus had never wanted to come with him, had received his urgings to do so in cold silence. They said, questioned, that it was because the Weasleys didn't like them. But they asked him along to the Manor even though you would think two people so observant would never miss the cold and halting pauses in the conversation.

_Blind, or they just care more for their own comfort than I do for mine? _

Harry sighed and rubbed his face. He didn't _want _to leave, so there was that. He thought he would have to, though. It was just—there wasn't enough room. They wanted different things. And sometimes, from the way Draco stalked away from an argument about quitting his job or Severus shut the door silently between them when Harry asked him to come to Victoire's fourth birthday party, it really did seem they would be happier without him.

Harry would try it just a little at first. Leave them a note now and move his things out to a little room in the Leaky Cauldron that he sometimes stayed in when the silence of the house got to be too much for him. If they were okay without him—and he thought they would be—he'd try a few more days, and another note.

He stood up.

And became aware of someone moving in the outer room. Harry frowned. Why would Draco and Severus have come back already? They were usually at the Manor until two or three in the morning. But it had to be them because no one else would have the ability to get past their locking wards.

Harry moved cautiously into the drawing room, and saw Draco brushing soot off his robe. Harry blinked. He had never seen _that _before. Of course, most of the time he saw Draco when he was already decloaked and seated with a glass of wine in his hand, but he had never pictured Draco getting soot on his robes. That was something that happened to Harry, not Draco.

At least that law of natural perfection held true for Severus, who stepped out of the fire just behind Draco. He fixed Harry with a quiet, stern eye, a different look than he would have given him had he caught him sneaking around the corridors in Hogwarts, and said, "Going somewhere?"

Draco's head whipped around, and he dropped the soot-stained cloak on the floor as though it didn't matter. Harry blinked in confusion. Draco never treated his clothes like that; the one time Harry'd had to take him to St. Mungo's since they'd been together, Draco had insisted on casting Folding Charms on his discarded robes before Harry carried him out the door.

"You were right," Draco told Severus, and then said, "Yes, where are you going?" in Harry's direction.

"I—" This was exactly why he had wanted to leave a note. Face-to-face, the thick, choking silence seemed to flow down his throat, and got in the way of _everything_.

Harry swallowed. _Don't be a coward. _"I thought I'd leave for a little while," he said, looking at the floor. "Let you have some time alone. See how you like it."

He winced over the last words, because they were waspish and petty in a way that they hadn't sounded in his head, but Severus took one quick step towards him from the right, and Draco from the left, and abruptly Harry was surrounded and contained. He stared at both of them. That was another thing they never did. They seemed to respect his Auror instincts and kept their distance with ease and grace.

"What makes you think we'd _like _to be alone?" Draco snapped at him.

"The same thing that made him want to leave in the first place," Severus said, eyeing Harry up and down as if looking for symptoms of poison. "Whatever that was."

"Of course," Draco said. "But what—Harry, we _invited _you to the Manor. You always refuse to come."

"It is not our company that he dislikes," Severus said, and considered Harry from the side, a great, grave bird, bigger than a condor. "Is it?"

Harry put his hands up a little. He felt thoroughly bewildered. "I just," he said.

Draco pressed close to him from one side, hand on his shoulder. Severus pressed in from the other, not touching him, because that was rarely his way unless they were in bed, but with the warmth of his presence undoing all the thick, tight strings, the hard hold, that Harry had promised himself he would keep on his emotions.

Harry bowed his head. Shit, he felt like he was going to cry, and although he usually didn't, he _hated _that feeling.

"What is it?" Draco whispered.

"Tell us," Severus echoed, a command but sounding less like one than normal.

Harry took a deep breath. He could handle this, couldn't he? Especially if it kept him from crying.

"You always look so perfect," he whispered. "And you like going places by yourselves, but you never want to go to the places _I _invite you to. I didn't go with you to the Manor because I know your mother doesn't like me, Draco, and I don't want to ruin her evening. And I don't go with you to the conferences and the meetings because either I would make everyone else uncomfortable or I wouldn't understand what your colleagues were talking about.

"I don't urge you to quit your jobs, I think your jobs are wonderful, but you don't think the same about mine." He was babbling now, but it seemed his heart had decided that if one thing was going to come out, it all was. "I try to get along with your friends when they come over here, but you just shut yourselves up in your rooms when the Weasleys are here. You wear better robes than I do, you sneer a little when I do things because I love being around you, and, it's just _not _the same. I don't want to leave, but it seems that you'd be happier without me, so what else should I do?"

He got that far only because no one had touched him, he thought, but he couldn't get any further when Draco grabbed him and kissed him.

Severus was hovering off to the side, slower to touch as usual. Harry closed his eyes, though, and gave himself up to both the warmth beating from Severus and Draco's kiss. He did have, in the back of his mind, that this wouldn't persuade him to stay and that he would just have to refuse in the end and make Draco unhappy, but he was incapable of standing there like a statue against the way Draco touched him, clung to him, held him.

Then Severus was there, arms around both of them, head bowed as though he would keep Harry from leaving with the chin on top of his head.

"We always invite you because we _want _you there," Draco whispered. "And if my mother hated you so much and didn't want you to come along, well, she should have said so." Harry felt Draco smile against his cheek. "Wait until I tell her that you noticed her bad manners. She'll be mortified. And I promise she'll improve after that, because she can't stand the thought that someone else thinks she's not civil."

"We urge you to quit your job when you are injured, and because the work often makes you unhappy," Severus whispered in turn. "Those are the only times."

Harry blinked. Yes, perhaps that was true. He hadn't thought of it before, but those conversations _did _tend to occur when he was recovering in hospital, or limping through the front door, or ranting about the Wizengamot's stupid prejudices that demanded more proof in trials where their friends were accused.

"And your looks—your looks are _perfect_," Draco said, tugging at his hair and making Harry shiver in spite of himself. "Never think they aren't. We don't just want people who look good in formal clothes all the time, Harry. You never look better than when you're sprawled around in your old robes and we know that you aren't going anywhere that day."

"As for the Weasleys…" Severus sighed. "They are simply _noisy_, Harry. I would not be averse to visiting with the adults in controlled settings." Unseen by anybody because of the way their heads were positioned, Harry grinned. Trust Severus to say it in that prissy tone. "I simply prefer not to be around children, with the shrieking and the chance that they might destroy something delicate. I spent too many of my best years around children for the prejudice to have left me."

Harry nodded thoughtfully. Sometimes the Weasley children, much as he loved them, got on his nerves, too, and the times Ron and Hermione had come over by themselves, instead of tagging along with a baby of their own or at least a niece or nephew to watch, were so rare he could barely remember them.

"All right," he said, unfolding slowly towards the belief, because this was the kind of thing he had wanted to be true all along, and it had to be edged up on carefully, because otherwise he thought it would disappear. "I—I accept this. I want this. I love you, so much."

Severus murmured words that might have been the same. That was Severus, more reserved, more aloof, and with Harry hesitating to ask anything of him that might have made him uncomfortable.

Draco took Harry's head between his hands and furiously shook him. "Yes, you idiot, of _course _we love you," he said, and kissed Harry again.

Severus tightened his hold, and Harry closed his eyes. There was so much warmth around him, now, and the sensation was at last driving away the cold that had come to roost in his bones.

He might be wrong, he might not look perfect, but this—this was.

**The End.**


	8. The Fire This Moment

**Title: **The Fire This Moment

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **Angst, eighth year at Hogwarts, past canon character deaths mentioned.

**Wordcount:** 1600

**Summary: **Draco cannot escape the stares, the hisses about his insanity, or the remnants of the Fiendfyre glowing under his skin. But neither can he escape Harry Potter.

**Author's Notes: **This was written for NikolasKristopher, who gave me the prompt "Whispered words, whispers in the dark mean nothing if you hide from me Draco," and "A love found in rebirth," and asked that this be posted on the 8th, their birthday. I hope this fic satisfies!

**The Fire This Moment**

His arms glowed.

His face glowed, too, under the stares of his friends, his enemies, his professors, his Housemates.

Draco had tried to pretend that everything was normal after the Fiendfyre and the Battle of Hogwarts and the death of the Dark Lord and his father going to prison. He _had. _He had tried as hard as he could. He had covered his glowing arms with makeup that his house-elves brought him when he was under house arrest during the summer, and with glamours once it was confirmed that he was going back to Hogwarts and the Aurors allowed him to use his wand again.

But the magic he seemed to have absorbed from the Fiendfyre was too strong. His arms still glowed, red and blue and white, with a coruscating edge of orange and gold and _pink _that came and went, and the flame shimmered and played at the corner of his eyes in a way that told him it was moving up into his neck and face, too.

No one knew what to make of it. His mother had shaken her head and encouraged him to hide it. His Housemates just stepped away from him, and it gave his enemies more fodder to whisper that of course he would be marked by the evil he had done. Even Fiendfyre rejected him. He was too evil to die in it.

It was so easy for everyone to forget that Draco had been _saved _from the Fiendfyre, and by no one less than their bloody hero. But said hero only watched him from a distance with eyes that burned in a different way, and although Draco could have gone and talked to him—he could feel the silent invitation from those eyes, and once or twice had even seen the outstretched hand—he avoided that, too.

Because then he would have think about the dreams, the dreams that filled his world with blazing fury and led him to fall off the broom, with Potter spiraling down to rescue him. Snatch him. Claim him with tongue and lips in a way that made Draco open his eyes regretting that there was no way to flee from his own mind and memories.

No. He ran. He hid himself in the library, in books, in dark corners. He hid himself with glamours that at least lasted until mid-morning, and pretended that he didn't hear the whispered words, either from people passing him or the ones that tumbled from his lips in the darkness. There was nothing he could do about it, save plow through the last months he had at Hogwarts and then hide at home.

Right now, hiding at home for the rest of his _life, _even, sounded appealing.

But that was before that day. That moment. That fire.

That moment of rebirth.

* * *

Draco cast his Strengthening Charm, which was supposed to make him strong enough to lift a whole table by himself, with the confidence of long experience. Since he had to spend so much time studying by himself, his wandwork had improved, and this was one particular charm he had known would be studied for the NEWTS, so he'd practiced it several dozen times already.

Except, this time, it didn't simply sink into his arms and make his muscles bulge. Instead, light flared all around him, and there was a crackling noise and the sharp sound of flames hissing and dancing.

When Draco could see, he turned his head and stared down at his arms. Surely, the charm should have worked—surely, despite the light that told him it hadn't—

And it had not. Instead, flames played up and down his arms, around his shoulders, up to his ears, making a corona that flared around his head.

Draco shut his eyes. He knew everyone in class was staring at him, and the whispers had started in a way that not even Flitwick could control. Probably they weren't half as damaging as the suspicions inside his own head. What if the lingering Fiendfyre magic had begun to interfere with his own? It might mean he could never cast another spell without wondering what the effect would be, instead of trusting it.

It meant—

Draco turned around. Harry Potter leaned across the table towards him, hand extended as it had been several times before. In the center of his palm was a small flame, gamboling and forming the shape of a lion, the way that so many of the flames in the Room of Hidden Things had.

It was beautiful, and Potter beckoned, his mouth open and the inside red and hot, the green eyes brilliant as lightning.

And then there was laughter, and Draco couldn't take it. He ran out of the Charms classroom fast enough that he might have burned up a few tables on the way, and headed straight for the dungeons.

* * *

Draco leaned his face against the stone wall, trying to cool his skin. The flames didn't burn him, or anything else, but they did gently heat him up, as though he stood in sunlight.

If he could think of it that way, he might stand a chance of coming to terms with it. As it was, he thought he might come to regard even warm showers with bitterness. This controlled him; it wasn't his to control.

"Draco?"

Of course Harry Potter had followed him from the classroom. Of course.

But it was easier to face mockery when there was only one person to laugh at him, not a multitude. Draco turned around, his hand braced against the wall to help him.

Potter's face shone. Around him danced the fire, leaping out from his fingers to caress the stone. Flames followed and surrounded him, outlined him, silhouetted him in blue, canopied him in orange. And when he held out his hands, both of them this time, Draco saw the flames that formed beasts in the center of them. One a dragon, one a lion, and they extended their necks towards each other and melted into one another, becoming one being of skin and fire and claws.

Draco stared at them, then up at Potter. "Why didn't you show the fire?" he whispered.

"I did," Potter said gently. "To you. But you looked away each time. I've been shining like this since the Fiendfyre. The difference is, I found glamours that work." He paused, but Draco could think of no words to fill the silence between them, and then Potter stepped forwards.

Draco wanted to panic and back away, but there was a stone wall behind him, and fire in front of him. He licked his lips and said nothing. All year, that had been his surest defense. He could make people think he didn't care, and they would eventually stop trying to make him.

Except that Potter had been through the fire, too, and he wasn't accepting indifference for an answer.

He reached out, and kept reaching out, and this time, his hands took hold of Draco's, and the lion and dragon leaped to his shoulders and danced there, in and out of his hair. And Potter kept pressing in and in, forwards and forwards, and the fire was roaring all around Draco, and he remembered the way that the muscles in Potter's stomach had jumped under his hold as they raced away from the Fiendfyre.

Potter had to stop, except he didn't. There was only forwards, and there was this moment, this moment bathed in light, bathed in fire.

His lips touched Draco's. Draco whimpered, because it was like his dreams—dreams that he wondered if Potter shared, the way he had shared the fire and the shining with Draco. Potter's hands arranged themselves in a cup shape around Draco's cheeks, and the fire crossed behind his back in braided streams, and shoved him into Potter's arms.

Potter kissed the way he did in Draco's arms, except hotter and realer and _better._ Draco finally opened his mouth, because there was no way to diminish the warmth except sharing it, and Potter's tongue pressed in, soft but insistent, approving. Draco moaned, and surrendered.

The fire roared around him again, but this was no dream, and this was no escape. Instead, Potter was _there_, and the fire was inside him as well as out.

"You can't hide from me," Potter whispered into his ear. "You don't need to hide from me. I gave up hiding after the war, and I only concealed the fire shining through me because I saw that you were trying, and I thought you should make the decision to come to me. I was trying to tell you that, but you didn't _listen._ You always did make me have to chase you to get any bloody answers. Stubborn Slytherin." His arms laced closer around Draco.

And perhaps the fire was more than something that had stolen Draco's friend from him, more than something that haunted his dreams and his skin. If Potter would walk into the Great Hall with his fire visible—which of course he would, from this moment forwards, when he had made the decision—perhaps the fire could be beautiful.

Potter looked down at him, eyes blazing, tender, asking a question.

Draco lifted his head, and blazed back.

**The End.**


	9. Beltane's Contrary

**Title: **Beltane's Contrary

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Snape/Harry/Draco

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **Angst, AU in that Snape survives

**Wordcount:** 4200

**Summary: **On the coldest day of the year, Harry, Draco, and Severus meet in the graveyard at Godric's Hollow, all of them come seeking surcease from different sorts of pain.

**Author's Notes: **This is another of my Advent fics, written for hpstrangelove, who requested: _Harry-Draco-Severus (No prior relationship). All three have been leading separate and lonely lives. They find themselves in the same place (bar/restaurant/hotel/church/graveyard whatever) on Christmas Eve/Day. Angst but no unhappy ending._ Here you are!

**Beltane's Contrary**

Harry let the new gate of the graveyard fall quietly to behind him.

He stood there instead of walking forwards for long moments, his hands in the pockets of his new jeans. There had been a lot of changes to the place since he was here with Hermione on their desperate Horcrux hunt, notably that the graves had been cleaned up, and the snow that lay on the ground and the headstones now looked soft and clean instead of threatening. But there was still a loneliness about it, a silence, that he didn't want to disturb.

He started walking after a few moments. The grass and the snow crunched together beneath his feet.

His parents' graves were well-tended now. Harry came on every holiday and most weekends, and placed flowers on them, and cut back the grass that would have grown over them. He knew that people wondered about that, but most of them also seemed to accept there were some mysteries in Godric's Hollow that simply wouldn't be solved, and were wise enough not to inquire too closely into them, either. As long as they left him alone, that was all he wished for.

_Not _all _he wished for._

Harry hunched his shoulders. Well, yeah, but that happy-ever-after with Ginny hadn't worked out. It was silly to keep mouthing at it and turning it over in his mind when the reality was all around him.

He stopped a second later, his foot poised above the ground, and then darted behind a ridiculously tall stone with an angel on the top. His hand was on his wand, his heart pounding, before he thought about it.

Yeah, this was the reality, and part of that reality included no more war. But a tall figure in a black robe and cloak by his parents' graves was still shockingly upsetting.

Harry closed his eyes and reasoned slowly through his immediate impulse. Sometimes he had found other flowers on the graves when he came, lilies, and always on his mother's, not on his father's. There were other people who could have loved his parents and wanted to honor them. He knew little about them, really. After the war, so many people talked about moving on and how they didn't want to think about the past anymore that Harry had felt bad asking for stories.

And the ones who had known them best…he couldn't possibly ask _Snape _about his mum, that would be silly. The celebrations and funerals after the war had consisted in large part of him and Snape avoiding each other's eyes and presences.

_Is that Snape over there?_

It could be. Which meant it was silly to hide, and Harry understood his reasons for coming here, and hiding and hesitating and acting like an idiot would only exacerbate the problem, not make it go away.

Besides, it was getting cold, and Harry wanted to be in bed early. Christmas at the Weasleys' was a complicated affair that required getting up at six or earlier in order to coordinate all the children. Harry paused one more time to lick his lips, and then stepped around the gravestone.

The figure's head turned at once, and Harry nodded. It was Snape. Hard to mistake those dark eyes, or the long, darkness-fringed scar that ran down the side of his throat. Harry muttered, "Here goes nothing," and walked towards him.

* * *

Draco looked in frustration at the two men standing in front of the gravestones he had planned to visit. What the fuck? Was life determined to spit on him no matter how many steps he took to mend his problems?

He shut his eyes and shook his head. _You know the answer to that, Draco. The answer is yes, of course. _

He clenched his hands down, and then swallowed and drew them back. He had his broken wand in his pocket. When he forgot and pushed his fingers too far into his jacket, the splinters pricked at him.

The Ministry had had no reason to break his wand. _No _reason. Yes, they had caught Draco in the middle of what turned out to be a Dark wizard's apothecary, but Draco had only been buying ingredients. They'd _examined _those ingredients. They'd agreed that they had no reason to hold him, that he was an innocent victim of the raid.

And then they'd broken his wand anyway.

Draco clenched his hands again, this time welcoming the pain from the broken wood. No. They would _not _destroy his life again. He would show those with old grudges in the Ministry, those he was sure were behind the breaking, that he would not give up and crawl into a dark corner to die, or become dependent on favors from those looking only to use him, or swallow his pride and humbly beg the Ministry for a new wand.

There was a potion he could brew that would allow him to change one thing about the past, one concrete and fixable thing that focused on an object and not a person. He needed a chip of stone from the marker of a grave whose occupant had died for a sacrifice of love. He had known at once whose grave he wanted to use, since the _Daily Prophet _hadn't shut up about Lily Potter's love sacrifice since Potter announced it was the reason he'd won. What stone could be more powerful?

But now these men were in the way—and then one of them moved and his hood fell off, and Draco saw it was _Potter_

Better and better. Draco slumped back, wondering when in the world he would go away.

Then Potter said, "What, even in death?" and the tall figure shifted, and Draco heard the hoarse, unmistakable voice, and knew it was Severus.

A plan came to him, as sharp as the broken wand, but one that might actually work, if Draco had the courage to carry it through. He swallowed and stepped out into plain sight.

* * *

Severus sneered at the boy. He had approached him in a conciliating fashion, and then he had asked the question that Severus had thought he would not ask—he had _dared _to hope that Potter had grown past being a boy in mind, no matter how much he still looked like one in body—and of course it had started it all again.

"Yes, of course," he said. "Your father deserves flowers, you say. Well, not from my hand. _Never _from me."

Potter's hands were held together in front of his chest, clasping each other as if that was the only safeguard that would keep him from shoving Severus. Severus waited for the push, for the tension to snap. His hand was on his wand already, and he didn't intend to move it from there.

Potter closed his eyes, licked his lips, and stepped away. "Well, maybe that's true," he said, and turned to face the graves, dropping to one knee in front of them. As Severus started, he whispered, "Hullo, Mum, Dad."

And _that _left Severus utterly wrongfooted. Potter wasn't supposed to _ignore him._ Potter wasn't supposed to act as though Severus's answers were reasonable and he was entitled to his own opinion. Potter was supposed to argue with him, furiously, and wave his arms around, and yell in his high-pitched voice—ridiculously high-pitched given the age he was—that everything was Severus's fault, and always would be.

A trembling shiver seemed to run through Severus, and the air in front of him seemed to fracture and change colors. He had felt that sensation only once before: the night he realized that he had caused Lily Potter's death, however inadvertently, and that the only way he could think of to make up for it was to go and surrender his will to Dumbledore's.

Severus clenched his wrist to his mouth, and closed his eyes.

"Severus. Potter."

And then there was something else there, something _wholly _unexpected. Albus had at least once told Severus that he might someday find Potter was more grown-up than he'd thought. Nothing had prepared Severus for Draco coming to the Potters' gravestones in the middle of the Godric's Hollow graveyard.

Draco stood there with his gaze darting back and forth between them, and then he cleared his throat and lifted his head a little, importantly. "I need something," he said in a loud voice. "Enough for me to go to Professor Scrubb and beg her help."

It took Severus a moment to place the name. The new Divination Professor at Hogwarts. By all accounts, she was a true Seer, but Draco had disliked Divination, by the end of the war. He always said that he would have killed himself if he had known the future. Severus could do nothing now but watch him blankly.

Draco spread his hands and turned back and forth between him and Potter, watching them both intently, head down, eyes gleaming a little. "Listen. She said that I would meet both of you in the graveyard tonight, and that together, we could create a—a ritual, a charm, that would guarantee all of us a good life henceforth."

Severus did some more staring, and saw Potter doing the same out of the corner of his eye. At least the boy had the sense to know that Draco was lying.

_Why _Draco was lying was the more interesting question.

Severus spoke, keeping his voice to the same low, smooth tone that had seemed to soothe Draco during the war, the rare times they had found to speak together. "Do you mean rituals such as the Amicitia, Draco? Those are rare, and hard to perform."

"But all you really need is a special place that matters to at least two of the people involved," Draco said eagerly. "This place matters to you because it's your parents, Potter, and it matters because—because you hated Potter's parents, Severus."

Severus had never been sure exactly how much Draco knew about Lily, and he had never wanted to ask. If he had betrayed himself in a moment of weakness, let it _stay _a moment, and a silent one at that. He nodded shortly, and said, "Yes, it matters. But the rituals such as you speak of still need intense preparation and ingredients we don't have."

"Not the one that Professor Scrubb told me about," Draco said, and dropped to his knees in front of the graves. Potter watched him without moving. He had shown remarkably little reaction to Draco's presence, in fact, and Severus wondered if he was simply interested enough to allow the scene to proceed to its end. It could not be that Potter was _sympathetic _to Draco. "Look, all we need is the place and the commitment." He scraped something off the grave. "And a bit of the place."

"My parents' headstones?"

Severus shivered. No need to remember the Dark Lord, not when _that _chill was in Potter's voice. He listened to the rising wind around them. Yes, it did have an edge of accidental magic. He hoped Draco proceeded carefully.

"Yes," Draco said, facing Potter again. He had concealed whatever he had taken from the stone in a pouch at his belt, and his face was guileless. "I promise, it's nothing horrible, Potter. I just want to do something that would guarantee me a good life. I've had a pretty bloody miserable time of it so far."

Severus watched Potter's eyes darken, and expected a rant in response to that, with Potter emphasizing how much harder _he _had it.

Instead, though, Potter's eyes only seemed to deepen as he watched Draco, and the next moment he held out his arm. "Fine," he said. "Do what you need to do."

Severus started at Potter in turn. The boy was doing nothing expected tonight, and that unnerved him.

* * *

Harry ached. He was tired. He wanted to be alone with his parents' headstones, and he wanted to leave and never come back so Snape and Malfoy couldn't make fun of him for seeking the company of the dead in the first place.

But if this place, this night, belonged to anyone, they belonged to him. Maybe Snape had the connection of loving his mother and Malfoy had the connection of being a right idiot with a knack for showing up at the wrong time, but Harry was _not _going to be driven away. Just like he wasn't going to argue or flinch or yell. He was done giving Snape and Malfoy what they wanted.

"Fine," he repeated, while Malfoy just gaped at him. "Do this ritual. Convince me."

Malfoy licked his lips. His eyes were large, and flickered with several colors in the dim lights coming from their wands and the distant Muggle houses. Harry had the distinct feeling that he had come this far without a plan, and had no idea what to do next.

_Well, good. That means that I'm not the only one out of place. _Snape would never acknowledge being out of place, of course.

But the next moment, Malfoy took a sharp breath, nodded, and said, "You should do it with your wand, Potter. You're the—the one with the strongest connection." His voice sounded sharp, but his gaze kept straying back to the headstones and to Snape and to Harry's arm as if he didn't know which one was the least alarming to look at. "You should do it tonight, because this is Beltane's contrary."

Harry blinked. "I thought Beltane's contrary was Samhain." Not that he knew much about Beltane at all, but it made sense that a bright, beginning time of the year was countered by the dark and dying one.

Malfoy shook his head, his voice gaining strength as he spoke. "No. This isn't _exactly _Midwinter, the solstice, that's past. But this is the beginning of another time of year that a lot of people honor, and it's a time of hope and beauty. Just in winter, not in spring or summer. It's the opposite in time of year, not intention. The ritual will have a lot of power if you do it tonight."

Harry regarded him in silence. Snape shifted his balance behind him, making the snow crunch.

Malfoy was almost certainly lying. Harry had no reason not to shove his wand in his pocket and walk away.

Except—

Except that he had sworn he wouldn't allow them to drive him away from his parents' graves. And because he half-wanted to see how far Malfoy would go with it, when he would admit that he had trapped himself in an impossible position.

And because he was tired and worn-out and far more unhappy than he should be on Christmas Eve, and a ritual to bring a bit of happiness into their lives didn't sound half bad.

"All right," he said. "Just tell me what I have to do, and I'm more than ready to go along with this."

* * *

_Just wonderful, Draco. _That was the way his father had always said it, the slight tone of praise all the more fake for being layered over disappointment. _What are you going to do now?_

Draco swallowed. He had come up with this to get Potter, especially, to let him get close, so he could steal a bit of the headstone and then run. But it had _worked, _and now he was sitting there all wrongfooted and aching and tender in parts of his heart, and he had no idea what he could come up with next.

He had to come up with something, though, or admit he was lying, and Potter was likely to tear him apart for that. Or Severus, standing with his arms folded and the same look on his face he'd had when Draco ruined a Draught of Peace, would, and Draco shuddered even more to think of that.

So he flew.

"You need to touch your wand to something that reminds you of this place," he babbled. "Not your arm. Blood won't matter to this ritual, unless it's your blood that reminds you of this place."

With a faint, perfect smile, Potter closed his eyes and pushed his fringe back, letting his wand rest against his lightning bolt scar.

Draco stared, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Severus take a step forwards. The next moment, he froze as though the Dark Lord had just come into the room. The look in his eyes was one Draco had never seen before, but he suspected it was also the same one he was now wearing.

And _that _was all right, wasn't it, for him to be struck and stricken by the gesture if Severus was? Because Severus had stronger shields and more reason to dislike Potter. Draco would have been his friend, once, if offered the chance. He was sure that Severus never would have.

"What now?" Potter whispered, the sound of his words odd because he had to speak while keeping his wand in the same place on his forehead.

Draco, shivering as though the enchantment was real and had already begun, whispered,  
"Now I contribute something to the ritual, something that means a lot to me." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a splinter of his wand.

Severus saw the motion, and saw the splinter, and his eyes widened. The glance he gave Draco was spear-deep, much like that splinter could have driven into his finger if Draco had been careless, and said he _knew_, and said that he wondered Draco could have stood to give up his secret like this.

Draco lifted his chin. Yes, he was shaking, but still, he was there, and there was snow under his knees, and Potter had his wand on his forehead, and if Severus wanted to speak, he could end this farce in a moment.

He chose not to speak. So Draco dared to incline his head as he laid down the splinter in the snow and said, "Now Severus has to cast a spell that means a lot to him, and you have to cast the spell at the same time."

"The target of the spell?" Severus's voice was queer.

"The gift I give the ritual, of course." Draco stood up and backed away from the splinter. He knew he could brew the potion, now that he had the chip of gravestone in his pocket. He knew he didn't have to have all the pieces of his wand for that. It was even possible that he was missing some of the small bits that had scattered in the initial explosion. But it would be easier if he kept the little piece of wood.

He hadn't. Potter was nodding, his eyes half-open but with no sign of recognizing the piece of hawthorn, and he was the one who said, "What spell, Snape?"

Draco held Severus's eyes, and said nothing. Yes, Severus could end this, could tell Potter definitively that the ritual was all made up, but Draco hoped that he wouldn't. He was high-hearted and breathless, and he wanted to see how it ended.

* * *

Severus's fingers tightened on the wand, and he pulled it out. His first instinct was to cast _Sectumsempra, _the perfect answer to Draco's insolence, and one that would disrupt the moment for him and Potter in unique ways.

But it wasn't what he wanted to happen, and not because of Draco's pleading, bright grey eyes—or not only that. There was also Potter, kneeling there in the snow, like a sacrifice but not with that purpose.

Severus had not realized he wanted to see that until he saw it.

His hand tightened on the wand until he thought he would simply spin away and end it that way. Then he pointed his wand tip at the splinter instead and said, "_Florissimus._"

A silly spell, one that he had invented when he invented _Levicorpus _and _Sectumsempra _and the rest of them. But it had been meant for a different purpose, not to humiliate and not to attack and not to defend. It had been meant to make flowers spring out of stone, and to make Lily smile.

A stupid spell. A silly one. One that he had never used in the last twenty years except to conjure flowers for Lily's grave.

And they came now, bright lilies, curling out of the splinter of Draco's wand—and when and how had _that _happened?—and drooping gracefully towards the snow. But there were other flowers, too, ones that Severus was sure _he _had not planted there, silvery-grey ones that echoed the color of the hawthorn wood.

And there was still a third wave of flowers as Potter quietly incanted the spell, and his hands were full of them, blue and clear, almost translucent as silk through the petals, but with no name that Severus knew, either. And they sprang from the splinter to mingle with Severus's lilies and Draco's grey flowers.

Potter opened his eyes, that shocking, striking green that had once meant so much to Severus, green in the middle of the winter.

Severus looked from him to Draco. Draco was kneeling on the ground staring at something in his hands. For a moment, Severus thought he had plucked one of the flowers or picked up the splinter, but then he turned his head in Severus's direction, his eyes filled and ravaged with light, and Severus realized that he was holding a hawthorn wand.

Complete.

Whole.

Severus stared at the wand and shook his head. Yes, the potion he suspected Draco was planning to brew would have worked to put the wand back together, but he had never heard of a ritual that would—especially a ritual that he highly suspected Draco of making up as he went along.

"Wow," Potter whispered. He was smiling. He looked at the wand in Draco's hands, and then looked up to meet Draco's eyes and nod. "It's right that the ritual repaired your wand," he said, and Severus did not wonder how he knew it had been broken, when he apparently didn't know before. "It's right that this happened, here, now, with us."

Draco said nothing, but cast the spell that Severus and Potter had into the snow beside the splinter. Out of it rose more white flowers, narcissus. Draco reached for one, plucked it, held it to his nose, and closed his eyes.

"This—this _means _something," Potter said, and Severus shifted his shoulders, irritated despite himself at the way that Potter had to cling hard to the moment, had to try and put words around it so it would do what he wanted. "I think it does, anyway. I think—I mean, we can't just walk away. By ourselves. Can we?"

The question at the end, Severus could forgive him for, because it left them at least the illusion of choice. He looked at Draco, and Draco lifted his head, eyes liquid and wide and forgiving.

"Yes," he whispered. "We _could._ But I don't want to."

Severus nodded before he thought about it, and then he had done it and could not take it back, any more than he could take back the spell he had invented for Lily and showed them. He stood there and watched Potter smile, and Potter nod, and knew that this was the beginning of something new, Draco's nonsensical lies and theories about Beltane notwithstanding.

The spell should _not _have made two kinds of flowers grow before Potter even added his variation. They should not have come together like this in a graveyard, and Severus should not have been looking forward to seeing what happened next.

But they had, and he was.

* * *

They made plans—in low voices, but they made them. And the first plan was to meet on Boxing Day for dinner, and the second plan was to choose, randomly, another place that was important to them, at Hogwarts, and see what might happen if they went there.

They walked in their separate directions, though Harry paused once to look back, and drink in the sight of them before they vanished. So he saw the quick way that Malfoy's head darted, too, hair swinging and gleaming in the starlight, and how Snape nodded to both of them, or at least gave curt head-snaps that could be interpreted that way, before he Apparated.

And Harry closed his eyes and whispered farewell to his parents and hello to something new before he, too, vanished.

**The End.**


	10. The Hogwarts Campaign

**Title: **The Hogwarts Campaign

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **Fluff, "eighth year" fic

**Wordcount:** 2700

**Summary: **Harry came back for his eighth year knowing what he wanted, and Draco Malfoy was one of those things.

**Author's Notes: **This is one of my Advent fics for the prompt that sandersyager gave me, asking for a confident and playful Harry in eighth year who tries to capture Draco for himself. Here you are!

**The Hogwarts Campaign**

Harry came back for his eighth year knowing what he wanted. He hadn't after the very end of the war, but it was wonderful how a summer of not being with the Dursleys and not having to worry about Voldemort clarified things for him.

First, he wanted enough NEWTS that he could legitimately enter the Auror program, without listening to any envious taunts about favoritism.

Second, he wanted to relax once in a while, which meant not _all _of his time was going to be spent studying for the NEWTS, no matter what Hermione thought.

Third, he wanted Draco Malfoy.

* * *

It had started because of the Fiendfyre, maybe, because of the way that Malfoy had clung to him instead of trying to do something stupid like upsetting the broom, which he would have done if he really _was _an evil git.

But there had also been the way that Malfoy mumbled thanks for saving his life and his wand when Harry returned the wand to him, and there had been the way he attended his father's trial with his face absolutely wiped clean of expression, daring anyone to mock him. And there was the fact that he was the only one of the Slytherins in Harry's year to come back to the school, everyone else either going to Durmstrang or working with private tutors.

That took courage. Mad courage, perhaps, instead of sane, but that was the kind of courage Harry worked with a lot. He could admire it, too.

Draco was here, instead of hiding. He was doing what he wanted, pursuing what he wanted, instead of retreating into a sullen commitment to doing nothing because the war hadn't worked out the way he wanted it to. He spent his time in studying or working with his head turned away, but that merely made him the greater challenge to catch and hold.

And Harry had always loved a challenge—one of the things he had learned about himself this summer, one of the reasons he had chosen not to continue dating Ginny. It would have been so easy to continue doing that, as easy as apple-picking, as falling in love on a summer's day with the sun slanting down. Harder to fall in love in the winter, harder to fall in love with someone wintry.

But he wanted to, so he set himself to it. _This _was the kind of warfare that he would happily take part in.

* * *

"Harry? You coming?"

Harry smiled at Ron and swung his leg over his broom again. The rest of the team had already trotted, panting, into the showers. "We're going to show them something," Harry said. "But for that to happen, I need to spend some more time flying. It's not like I got much practice in the last year."

Ron grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. His smile was more open now, his swagger more of pure confidence than anxiety. Harry wasn't the only one who had decided what he wanted during the summer. "Right, mate. I'll see you in the Tower later."

Harry nodded, waited until Ron was safely out of sight, and then took off again.

He knew Draco would be on the Quidditch Pitch in three minutes at the most. One of the ways that Draco seemed to regulate himself and kept his pursuit of what he wanted going was to stick to a strict routine, and he always went flying a little after five in the afternoon, when none of the other teams were practicing.

Not that he'd joined the Slytherin team again, either. He could have been the captain, but he didn't want that.

Harry reckoned that it was time to see if Draco wanted a flyer.

He circled idly until he caught a flash of blond hair out of the corner of his eye. It halted immediately. He knew Draco would have seen him. Now he stood there wondering if it was worth continuing onto the pitch when it would mean a confrontation of the kind he and Harry had avoided all term.

Harry hunched his legs around the broom, his gaze remote and fixed on the horizon as though nothing could be less important to him than his audience.

And then he took off.

He streamed straight upwards, the wind whipping his hair so hard that he felt as if he'd swallow half of it. Then he flipped himself over and over, in place like a windmill's rotating blades, but kept going upwards at the same time. The sky and the ground soared and swooped around him, and Harry laughed aloud.

He straightened at the point where his lungs were working hard for air and turned a single, hard circle before he stretched out his arms and began to pivot, with the broom as the center of his spin. It was dangerous; he could feel the wind tugging at him again, and he had to keep part of his attention on the circles and part on driving the broom forwards. But he succeeded, and he knew he looked like a spinning star as he made his way towards the Forbidden Forest.

He pulled up far short of the Forest, of course, and took a moment to press his hair back and another to gasp. Then he dived at the ground.

This was no Wronski Feint; this was a committed course, and if everything went well, Draco should be watching with bated breath, sure Harry would crash and wondering if he ought to run and tell someone before that happened. But Harry took the burden away and made Draco concentrate on something else—at least, he hoped he did—by beginning to spin as he fell.

Wild and swinging; not even as good a flyer as Harry was could control himself fully, and he knew that he staggered in circles that seemed destined to carry him into the grass. But he had done this before, and judged it more often, and he reached the point where he knew he had to turn or die.

He turned, and swept along parallel to the grass, his shoulder brushing the blades, before he landed, turned, and bowed.

Draco froze. He had come into the open, staring, drawn, and now he stood there as nervous as a deer, looking as if he wanted to scream insults before Harry could.

"That performance is dedicated to you," Harry said softly, holding his eyes, and then picked up his broom and walked away before Draco could get a word in edgewise.

* * *

The owls were flying in with the morning post before Draco showed up at breakfast. Harry breathed a quick sigh of relief as Draco slid into place at the Slytherin table. His "brilliant" plan would have been utterly ruined had Draco not come in.

Draco perhaps heard the sigh, or was simply paranoid, because he sent Harry a quick and unconvincing sneer before he fell on his food. Then he had to stop and look up, because the post owl Harry had hired was hovering above him, extending a box wrapped in silver paper.

The other students at the Slytherin table looked over, and so did most of the others seated at the different tables. Harry had counted on that. He wanted others to see how appreciated Draco was, how desired. He sipped at his tea and tapped Hermione on the arm, nodding at Draco. She had asked him what he was up to with the things he had bought on his last trip to Hogsmeade. Gratifying her curiosity would please her and might earn him an ally.

Hermione looked up just as Draco finished casting a few protective hexes on the box and ripped the paper open. He had strips clenched in either hand and his teeth gritted, as though he defied the box or the sender to do its worst to him. Harry smiled, nearly bursting with pride. That was the Draco he had seen over the summer and got to know better since they'd been here. He stood up to what scared him, and tore through it if he could, or retreated with dignity if he couldn't.

This time, it was a dark box decorated with gold paper that confronted him, and Draco's hands shook a little as he opened it. Harry nodded when the chocolates inside appeared before everyone. He had bought Draco's favorite kind, which luckily Honeydukes carried. They were the kind his mother used to send him, the kind Harry had seen him obsessively eating during his father's trial.

Draco hesitated. Then he looked around the Great Hall, and his head stopped moving when his eyes fell on Harry.

Harry stood up and bowed. There could be no doubt about who had sent the gift, at least not between them. He wanted Draco to know someone cared enough to get him things he liked.

Then he sat back and started eating his breakfast, and slowly the rest of the Great Hall followed suit. Harry did catch movement from the corner of his eye a moment later, and looked up.

Draco must have used all the spells he needed to reassure himself that the chocolates weren't poisoned. His hand was just retreating from his mouth, and his eyes were shut, and there was a thin line of chocolate around his lips.

Harry smiled, and kept eating.

* * *

"Do you need help?"

Draco started and glared at Harry. Their NEWT Potions class was so small they didn't usually work with partners, and he had gone to the storage cupboard by himself. Harry nodded to the ingredients in his hands. "You'll have an easier time mashing them up if you have a partner," he said.

Draco paused. Harry could see the struggle in his eyes, between pride and the fact that he would do better on this particular potion if he followed Harry's advice.

Common sense won, as it had since the war, as Harry thought it always would in this Draco he liked. "Yes, if you want to help," Draco said in a clipped tone, and led Harry towards the table where he was working. Harry could feel Hermione's astonished gaze on his back, but he ignored it. She was working by herself and doing a good job of it, so she shouldn't mind if Harry went off and helped someone else.

Draco watched Harry's hands carefully at first, but Harry sliced the roots and then mashed them with precision he had picked up through his NEWT study. It turned out there were all sorts of books in the library about how to prepare Potions ingredients if you looked for them. At last, Draco relaxed and began to work beside him, counting softly under his breath as he stirred the potion.

Harry watched his hands. Slender and nervous, but steady. Draco would go well, and would go far, if he could just maintain the stance he'd taken.

"Why are you doing this?" Draco asked out of the side of his mouth.

Harry answered honestly. He thought this Draco had come too far to be repelled by honesty. "I'd like to date you. You've proven that you're stronger than anyone else thought. I'm interested in you."

Draco turned and stared at him. "And you thought showing off was the way to win me?"

_Interesting that he didn't immediately deny I could be interested in him, _Harry thought gleefully, and inclined his head. "You're talking about the tricks I pulled flying? I thought that would be the way to capture your attention. Not always hold it."

Draco was silent. Harry turned his attention back to the roots he was mashing. They would be syrupy in a short time, and ready to add to the potion.

"You're doing too much," Draco whispered. "I didn't need your chocolates. I didn't need your help with the potion."

Harry looked up at him. "But you'll do better with them," he said softly. "That's what I want to give you, the pleasures of life, not just the bare necessities that so many people might think you deserve."

Draco spent the rest of class giving Harry soft astonished looks. Harry smiled at him when he thought he could get away with it, and lingered as long as he could in helping Draco prepare the potion, before he scurried back to his own table to finish his.

Draco's potion received the highest mark in the class. Draco turned and looked at Harry when Slughorn announced that, and Harry shrugged back, smiling.

* * *

"I need to make a decision."

Harry looked up. He had spent a long day making sure that others knew about the way Draco hadn't identified him at Malfoy Manor, but since he hadn't actually seen Draco anywhere, he had gone back to the library in order to study for the Potions practical. Now he leaned back and put a finger in his book, with his heart speeding up. Draco stood in front of him with a steady stare that Harry knew was either going to make or break him.

"Do you?" Harry asked, as calmly as he could. "What kind of decision?"

"I need to decide if I'm going to take you seriously or not."

Harry just sat there, a lump in his throat, unable to say anything. He wanted to encourage Draco to do it, but ultimately, the decision had to be Draco's. That was the whole point, wasn't it? They had come this far, but this Draco Harry liked was the one who _could _make choices on his own, who wouldn't let the decisions that others made influence him too much or control him.

"Go on, then," Harry whispered, in a voice that he barely recognized as his own.

Draco sighed and stared at him. Then he said, "I'm taking the chance that this could be a joke. Or else that you're just lonely because you're not with female Weasley anymore and you'll take up with her the minute she shows a sign of wanting you."

Harry shook his head. "Ginny and I have our own lives now. She knows that I want something different, more of a challenge."

Draco raised his eyebrows. "But that's just the sort of thing you _would _say if you wanted to trick me and make me believe you."

Harry only sat still. Nodding in response might make Draco think he agreed, which might make Draco turn his back and walk out of the library.

Draco sighed hard enough to ruffle Harry's hair and studied the ceiling of the library for a moment. Then he looked back down and said, "I'm going to take a chance. The way I did by coming back to Hogwarts in the first place, the way I did by not leaving the Quidditch pitch when I saw you flying. I'm going to take a chance on you."

And he held out his hand, palm down.

Harry surged to his feet, grabbed it, and kissed it. Then he kissed Draco on the lips, which, from the way he stiffened and struggled for a moment, Draco had _not _been expecting.

But then he relaxed and kissed back, his hands rising so he could stroke the hair back from Harry's face, his mouth opening under Harry's. Harry greedily took the chance to kiss and lick at him. In fact, it took several tries for Draco to force him back, and then he stood there panting with Harry grinning at him, clasping his hands, until he seemed to recover his breath and his balance.

"_You're _taking a chance, too," he said, as if determined that Harry should have the benefit of his opinion. "You have no idea that this will work out."

"I'm willing to take that chance," Harry said, and kissed his hand once more, thinking of the Fiendfyre, and the flying, and the kiss, and all the days ahead.

**The End.**


	11. Like Hawks in Midair

**Title:** Like Hawks in Midair

**Disclaimer**: J. K Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

**Pairing:** Harry/Draco

**Rating:** R

**Warnings**: Mentions of past angst and infidelity, creature!fic (Draco is a Veela), AU after HBP

**Wordcount**: 1400

**Summary**: Harry and Draco spend their Christmas together-in flight.

**Author's Notes**: This is the eleventh of my Advent fics, written at the request of "eelegantlyeevil". She asked for a Christmas fic set in the universe of _A Year's Temptation_, my first Veela fic. Don't read this story without having read that one first, or this probably won't make sense.

**Like Hawks in Midair**

"So you aren't going to the hovel for Christmas, then."

Harry spent a moment looking at the ceiling, which didn't change from the graceful curve he was used to, and then turned to Draco, shaking his head. "Telling you to call it the Burrow is just bound to be an exercise in futility, isn't it?"

Draco smiled back at him. His wings trembled around his shoulders, in the state between real and ethereal where they looked like morning mist. Harry tried to keep his gaze away from Draco's face. He would fall into a trance of staring when Draco was like this, and that wasn't good for either his point or Draco's ego.

"It might be," Draco agreed. "Of course, you know that I'm always open to bribery."

Harry turned to him, his arms folded and his face set. Draco's smile deepened. His wings rose, his face shimmered, and Harry felt the edges of that pleasure that could build between them at any time. It was pure heady existence, it was light, it was sunlight, it was sun-warmth-

It was something that neither of them needed right now, that was what it was. Harry shook his head and stepped back. "Incorrigible," he muttered. "Besides, you know that everything I am is yours already. You have common shares in my heart and soul. What more could you _want_, exactly?"

"Ah, Harry, you do know how to disarm me."

Draco moved closer, the wings rising and spreading like clouds. Draco was Draco, still, beautiful and proud and arrogant and poised, and the one who had come seeking Harry and only the second person whom Harry had fallen in love with.

The only one, now.

Draco was impatient, seeking hands, and an even more impatient seeking tongue, and Harry lifted his head and spread his hands in response, sinking them into blond hair and white feathers as he murmured, "Of course I'm not spending Christmas Day with them this time, Draco. I'll still see the Weasleys sometime over the holidays, but I gave them Christmas last year. I can be with you this time."

"So nice of you to apportion it that way," Draco said, rearing back and looking at him with half-lowered eyes.

Harry snorted. "You know what I endure," he said, plastering his hand melodramatically to his brow. "Arguments from them that you still aren't good for me and I should have stayed with Ginny." Few of those came in quite that form anymore, but Harry could read the wistfulness in Molly's eyes whenever he came over, carefully, after Ginny and Ralph had left. "From you, arguments that no one else is good enough for me and I should only ever stay with you. What do you have to offer me _besides _those arguments?"

"Well."

There was that smile Harry had seen on Draco's face when he was courting Harry, and telling him he could fall in love, and in the photograph of Draco in the album he had offered Harry: the dangerous one. Not because it promised anger, or danger if Draco was crossed. Instead, it was the smile that had convinced Harry there was something human as well as Veela here, and he reached out his hands.

Draco took them and kissed them, and then turned towards the door of the house, tugging Harry with him, a wing around his waist. The feathers scraped against Harry's skin, and he half-sighed and closed his eyes, letting the pleasure pour over him like honey this time.

Once outside, Draco spent a moment scanning the Manor grounds, as if someone he didn't want within the wards _could _have come here. Then he turned and held out his arms to Harry, drawing him closer with one hand and one wing.

"You'll let me carry you?" he whispered. "Higher than we've gone before, faster?"

Harry hesitated only once. Draco had superhuman strength when he wanted to use it, of course, but that had mostly happened when they were still courting or Harry was in danger. This was a still, starlit Christmas Eve, a little snow on the ground, some high clouds in the sky, but overall not a time or place where Draco could imagine that Harry would be in danger.

_Well. _It was possible for Draco to imagine that Harry was in danger at any time and in any place, of course. But this was less likely than some other times, at least.

"If you want to," he said, and stepped forwards until he was in the circle of the wings, in the cocoon of warmth, though it was hard to tell which warmth came from the feathers and which from Draco's eyes.

"I always _want _to," Draco said, his eyes shining with starlight.

They were so focused. Harry closed his eyes with an intense shiver that the cold had nothing to do with. It was still hard, sometimes, to remember that he was the focus of that passion, and that he always would be.

"Then let's fly," Harry said, and kissed Draco's throat, and leaned backwards as Draco snatched him and reeled up from the ground.

The snow crunched beneath them, and then fell past them. And then they were aloft, winging, Draco's pinions stretching out gloriously into the distant, jeweled blue-black, the diamonds of stars studding the sky above them.

Not brighter than Draco's wings. Not brighter than Draco's eyes, or his strength, or his love.

They wheeled round and round, and Harry clasped Draco's sides with both arms and laughed aloud, and Draco's breath was in his eyes and his hair. Draco stroked Harry's face with long, gentle fingers, and kissed him when they reached the apex of their flight, hovering there, with complicated motions that no bird could have imitated, poised and hanging.

"You look as though you were suspended on a thread from the top of the midnight," Harry said, and then blushed a little. It didn't happen often, but Draco's allure did sometimes make him pop out with stupid poeticisms like that.

Draco smiled back, and wrapped him more strongly with his arms as his wings beat, sending in gentleness and waves of warmth every time the wings came close to Harry. Harry shut his eyes and murmured, and Draco parted his legs with strong hands, letting his thigh slip in between Harry's to rub against him.

Harry accepted it with a toss of his head back, unable to worry about Draco dropping him even as the chances for that increased, and Draco said something so soft and pleased that Harry didn't need to hear the actual words; the tone made him feel like he was being caressed.

"I love you."

The light, the stars, the dark, the wings, the words, Draco's eyes—

Harry came with bright ease, gasping as white stars flared behind his eyelids, and heard Draco grunt and falter in his wingbeats for a moment as he came from Harry's coming, and they spiraled a bit towards earth before Draco got control of himself and guided their descent into a gentle fall.

They landed in the middle of the snow, and Draco kissed him behind the ear and cast a charm while Harry was still gathering himself. Harry thought it was a cleaning charm at first. But he didn't feel noticeably cleaner, and finally he turned in curiosity, opening his eyes, to see what Draco had done.

A glamour of silver hawks rose and darted and dipped above the snow, leaving lines of light behind them as they flew which only started to fade when they reached the beginning of the pattern once more. And the pattern they flew was of a Christmas tree.

"Only the first of many gifts that I intend to give you, now we're spending Christmas together," Draco promised, his fingers curling into Harry's hair.

"Only the latest of many you've already given," Harry said, and smiled at him.

Then there was more furious kissing, and Draco's wings wrapped around Harry, cutting him off from the world, but inside all the world he needed.

**The End.**


	12. Shadows Stay in the Corners

**Title: **Shadows Stay in the Corners

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **Mild angst

**Wordcount:** 1900

**Summary: **Waking up in Harry Potter's flat was nothing Draco would have expected, and nothing like he would have expected.

**Author's Notes: **This is another of my Advent fics, for helenadax. She gave me the prompt: _Harry/Draco. Their first morning after is awkward, but cute._ This is for you, sweetie.

**Shadows Stay in the Corners**

Draco opened his eyes, and promptly closed them again.

He wasn't _stupid. _He could hear the shower running, and that meant he knew someone was in the other room showering. And it had to be a different bathroom than his, because he never allowed people to come home with him. He knew there were people who thought him snobbish for it, but it was just a point of etiquette he wanted to maintain. A wizard's home was where he could be private. Draco had started dating people that could admit that.

Except, now...

` He had come home with someone who didn't.

Draco rolled over slowly. He was looking at a plain bedroom, or so it seemed at first. Only when he looked around did he see the deep, rich colors in the wood, and the books stacked thickly on the shelves, and the robes that hung in the cupboard off to the side in neat, ordered rows. The robes on the floor, which were stained with-things-had rather commanded his attention at first.

A well-lit room, with a Muggle electric light overhead as well as a window that admitted bright sunlight onto the bed. Draco wasn't sure whether he wanted the window to be enchanted or not. If it was real, he'd spent way too much time here, but on the other hand, it was vulgar to have an enchanted window in a private room like this.

The shower shut off.

Draco sat up, rubbing his hands down his cheeks and swallowing. He wondered for a moment why he couldn't remember last night. He hadn't been drunk, he knew that. He never was when Blaise took him to some new place. He wanted to remain alert and aware, to judge the level of the talent that was attempting to seduce him.

Then the other man stepped from the shower into the bedroom, wrapped in a towel around the waist and wiping his hair with a second one as if he hated it, and Draco's memory barrier broke. His brain had been trying to protect him from the trauma, he knew then, but it was too late when the symbol of said trauma was standing right in front of him.

"Oh, no," he moaned. "Anyone but _you_."

Harry Potter lowered his head towel and blinked at Draco for a moment. His green eyes were wide, but not as blank as Draco would have assumed. He could see without his glasses now, then. "Well, it nearly was," he said mildly. "There were other applicants to climb into your bed, I know that."

"I would never have chosen anyone who was _that _persistent." Draco folded his arms and glared at him. But he could feel that his cheeks were on fire, and Potter, his smile deep and amused and deepening even further as he looked at Draco, knew exactly what it meant.

"Oh, but you did," Potter said, and left Draco to remember the several dances they'd shared while he turned around to take a set of robes from the neat row in the cupboard.

Draco kept on staring at his back. Potter bent down to drop the towel, and _that _left Draco staring at his arse. His fine, fine arse. Draco licked his lips as other memories came back, not all of them bad.

Then he shook his head. Regardless of whether he had had fun or not, he was here with _Potter, _and that wasn't something that was meant to happen in any incarnation of the world.

"You're welcome to stay here," Potter added over his shoulder, raking his hair back behind his ears and studying the effect in a mirror underneath the window. Then he snorted and cast a spell that dried his hair. "I don't know why I bother. It always looks like a mess anyway."

"What time is it?" Draco demanded.

Potter turned to stare at him. "About ten in the morning. What, you can't tell from the angle of the light?"

Draco folded his arms and sat upright, aware that he would look a little silly naked in the middle of Potter's bed (and since when did he sleep _naked_?) but determined to have a try at preserving his dignity anyway. "Where are you going at ten in the morning? Either it's Saturday and you should sleep in more than that, or you should be at work already."

Potter had a ringing, merry laugh when he wanted to, which irritated Draco all to hell. "It's Saturday, sure, but we were back here by midnight." He gave Draco that deep smile again; this time, it made Draco flush all down his chest. "And we had an _athletic _session. That means we were asleep by one. Well, you were. I kept waking up during the night and reaching over to touch you and make sure you were real."

Draco shook his head frantically. "Listen to yourself, Potter. Don't you realize someone must have drugged us?"

"Ron was watching," Potter said calmly. "He would have cursed anyone who tried. And I'm on my way for lunch with him and Hermione, which is a tradition we've done every Saturday for years. Like I said, you can stay here. Or you can come with me, although I can't promise that they'll be thrilled."

"Thrilled? _Thrilled_?" Draco was trying to work up the right kind of outrage, but it was hard to when he could see the scars on Potter's torso, and remember touching them, too. "You realize that this changes everything, Potter?"

Potter shook his head. "I really don't see why. You've talked to me a few times about 'having' me, and it got more pointed and sexual since Hogwarts. You think I haven't noticed that? Last night, I just decided I was tired of all the teasing, and I wanted to see how serious you were. And you're more serious than I ever imagined." He closed one eye in a wink as deep as that smile.

Draco was so red he had to take the covers off his chest. At least Potter's eyes dipped down most satisfactorily to his navel before he blinked and glanced away. "I remember teasing you," Draco said. "I thought the world would have to end before you'd take me up on it."

"But last night, you did." Potter leaned forwards and planted his hands in the middle of the blankets, between Draco's spread legs, not far from Draco's groin. Draco swallowed, and found little air and less spit in his throat. "And I'm grateful," Potter added quietly. "If you choose not to stay, fine. But I'm grateful to have had this one night."

His gaze seemed to burn through Draco, who fumbled for the covers again. "When did you get this _confident_?" he mumbled.

Potter grinned and stepped back. "When the war ended. There's the ending of the world for you, if you like. It was _my _world at the time, and at first I thought that there was nothing I could do, nothing that would ever live up to the experience of defeating You-Know-Who." Draco stared at him with narrowed eyes, and Potter added without missing a beat, "I noticed you flinched last night when I said his name.

"But I decided in the end that I owed myself more than that, to collapse and deflate like a balloon when my 'purpose' was gone. I'm an Auror, and I'm a friend, and I'm someone who sleeps with men he finds attractive. You can be part of that if you want. You don't have to." He turned away and tugged on the robes firmly.

Draco scowled at Potter's back. It was ridiculous, but what he really wanted to say was, _I'm trying to have a typical morning after here, and you're fucking it all up._

"You know."

Draco started and looked up at Potter, who had paused by the bed and was gazing down at him, his head tilted to the side, his finger resting on his chin. Draco had the feeling he was imitating someone, but no matter how he rifled his memory, he couldn't decide who or what it was.

"You don't have to make up your mind right now," Potter whispered. "You can think about it, and about the memories, and-stay here in my bed and sleep, how about that? I'm always back from lunch about one. That's enough time for you to decide if you want to touch me again."

Draco spluttered. This time, he managed to say, "That's the thing you're most concerned about, whether we can have sex again. Don't you realize that's fucked up? Don't you realize that-"

Potter's hand came down and covered Draco's mouth. Draco stifled the impulse to lick it. Yes, he could remember the taste of Potter's skin, and it was tempting, but that didn't mean he could do this when it was the very thing he was arguing against.

"It's not the thing I'm most concerned about," Potter said quietly. "But I do think it might help you make up your mind. Think about it. Remember it. You haven't let yourself really _remember _it yet, have you?"

Draco shuddered. He hadn't. And not because it was unpleasant. When he could remember legs and arms wrapped around him as if he was the prize Potter had always wanted, it was _doubly _something he thought he could imagine, taste, want.

"Yes, exactly," Potter said, as if he had spoken aloud, and pulled his hand back. He was smiling. "I think you need some time to meditate on it, and so do I. And in the meantime, I'm going to lunch with my friends, and you can make up your mind about whether or not you _want _this to change your life."

Draco just looked at him and blinked. He would have shaken his head, but he couldn't find the strength. Was it really this simple? Was Potter really banishing the shadows with this simple statement?

It seemed he was. He bent down and kissed Draco, and although Draco spared a thought to the unbrushed state of his own teeth and the ragged clumps of his hair hanging down beside his cheeks, it seemed Potter didn't. He kissed with as much enthusiasm as the memories suggested, and went his way, smiling.

Draco sprawled back on the pillow and stared around. Potter had some thick books on Potions theory on the top shelf, he noted absently. He'd flung the towel on the floor beside the clothes from yesterday. But Draco's clothes were folded neatly on top of a chair with a scuffed seat that looked as if Potter used it more to reach high shelves than for sitting.

Draco looked again at the enchanted window, no, the real one, if it was shedding light like that, and then at the corners of the room where shadows crouched.

Potter wouldn't let them come out and overcome him. If Draco wouldn't.

It was his choice.

Possibly terrifying, but he had a few hours to think about it.

Draco curled up in the bed, and began to remember.

**The End.**


	13. Cutting the Knot

**Title: **Cutting the Knot

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **Angst, past infidelity

**Wordcount: ** 1300

**Summary: **Harry, Draco, and one vial of Veritaserum.

**Author's Notes: **This is another of my Advent fics, this time for mothlights. She asked for Harry, Draco, and anything with Veritaserum and truth as a primary theme.

**Cutting the Knot**

Potter leaned back from the table, his eyes wide. He said nothing, though, his teeth grinding down in that way Draco knew and hated. They would be biting his tongue, sinking into his gums, holding any possibly betraying sign captive.

His breath rushed through his nostrils despite their narrowness; he struggled in silence against the arms of the chair, as though he wasn't capable of rising and walking away from it and this blank little room if he wanted. But he stayed, because Draco had told him what would happen if he didn't.

Draco held up the vial of Veritaserum in silence. It gleamed, lit from within by a fugitive gleam of light from the fireplace. He turned it back and forth, and let Potter get as good a look at it as he needed or wished.

After long, slow moments, Potter nodded.

Draco smiled and reached out, but the little wooden table, small though it was, was still wide enough to separate them. His hand fell far short of the strained, bulging arm that Potter had fixed on the chair. Draco shrugged and rose, circling the table towards Potter.

Potter looked up at him in that same, fixed silence. His green eyes were wild, and Draco could see the gleam of magic in them, magic that was perfectly capable of causing his death if Potter lashed out.

Draco knelt down in front of Potter and lifted his hands and his throat, baring them in the quiet, baring them to the magic, baring them to all the things Potter could do, if he didn't care that much about the consequences. And he might not. It had taken them this, the vow Potter had made to show up here and the Veritaserum, to come this far. Draco would know the reason if Potter turned away at the final hurdle.

He would blame him, of course. But mainly, he would _know_.

Potter bowed his head. His body shook as though horror and hatred were traveling through him in pulses like waves. Draco waited, and all the time the Veritaserum gleamed and shone like Potter's eyes.

At last, Potter nodded.

Draco stood up and tapped the vial. A few of the droplets fell out, and landed on his finger. He extended it, and felt Potter watching him with double the intensity that Draco watched himself, to make sure that none of the precious potion it had taken him so many hours to brew fell from his finger.

Potter's mouth stretched open, further, further. His tongue was there, lapping the air, begging as he had never been able to bring himself to beg.

Draco laid his finger on Potter's tongue, smearing the Veritaserum there, and stepped back.

Potter pulled his tongue into his mouth and shut his eyes. When he opened them again, they shone like the potion.

"Your name?" Draco asked, his voice falling into the silence.

"Harry James Potter." Potter stared at him without the same limp slackness in his face that Draco would have expected from any other victim of Veritaserum. Of course he did, Draco thought, rolling his eyes. Potter had to be special like that.

Then he remembered what else being special had brought Potter, and shook his head. That was part of the reason they had come here, and it was the reason Potter had given him the power to brew the potion and ask the questions at all.

"Your relationship to me?" he asked.

Potter's throat bobbed several times. Draco waited. He knew he had brewed the potion correctly. That wasn't the problem. The problem was what had brought them here, an interrogation room in the depths of the Ministry that both of them had passed by but spent no time in before, because it was the only place where Draco could think of this kind of thing taking place.

Always the same bloody problem.

Potter opened his mouth, and the answer came away like someone tearing a chunk of bloody flesh from the back of his throat. "You're my lover."

Draco half-closed his eyes. He could feel the sound of the word pounding at his stomach like a fist, and he swallowed several times. Then he said, "Tell me why you needed Veritaserum to admit that."

Here it was. Crux, center, goal, and quest object. The thing Potter had never been able to say, the words he had never been able to bring himself to utter.

Draco waited.

Once again, the silent struggle. Not because the potion didn't work, not because Potter hadn't known the question was coming, but because so many different possibilities underlay the lack of a coherent answer up to this point that the Veritaserum had to sort through them all before Potter could name the real one.

Then Potter whispered, "Because it scares me, knowing that I love a man. Knowing that I love _you_."

Draco opened his eyes and took a step forwards, his fist planted on his own stomach now.

Potter stared at him, and the words spilled and spilled and spilled. "Because how can I tell my friends anything, when you were so horrible to them and I still don't _understand _why I decided to fuck you? Why you decided to fuck me? Because how can I say anything after all the months I was silent and turned away when you bared your heart to me? Because what _is _this, this stupid _thing _where we run into each other and kiss in corners and fight in public and then shag like the world's going to end the moment we get a bit of privacy? I've never been so terrified in my life as I was at that one bloody Ministry celebration where we were in that corner and someone casting a _Lumos _Charm in the wrong place could have revealed me on my knees for you."

"You've also never come so hard in your life," Draco muttered, not because he really wanted to interrupt the confession Potter had finally agreed to give him, but because he couldn't compel himself to keep silent.

Potter nodded to him and said, "I don't know this person I am, now. The person I knew wanted a family and marriage and to be an Auror. And _nothing else. _I kind of suspected I would change the first time I had sex, but-not like this.

"The person I used to be would never have had sex with a man, or cheated on his girlfriend with one, or, hell, kissed one. Held hands with one. Slept beside one." Potter's eyes were wide and savage in the firelight. "I _changed, _and I don't know how this happened, and sometimes I think I want the old Harry back, the one who was _normal _and didn't have fantasies about forcing you to your knees and my cock down your throat. I want to be him more than I want to be myself."

Draco took his fist away from his stomach. This time, there could be nothing to cushion the blow. "You want that more than you want me?" he whispered.

Potter's eyes caught his.

Time caught.

Then Potter sobbed, and whispered, the relief like a poison in his voice, "No. I want you most. I love you most. I don't-don't wish I was the old Harry all the time. I know I can't go back to him, I don't really want to, he's just a safe fantasy and a dream that I can flee to-"

And then Draco was on him, kissing him, holding him, forcing him still, while Harry sobbed and sobbed and clung to him, and Draco was tasting his tongue and tasting his truth and tasting his words, and whispering, "Hush, hush, it's all right. You've said enough."

**The End.**


	14. Psychopomp

**Title: **Psychopomp

**Disclaimer: **J. K Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Snape

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **A bit of angst, AU in that Snape survived

**Wordcount: ** 1800

**Summary: **Harry never expected to see _him_ staring across the bonfire

**Author's Notes: **Another of my Advent fics, this one for sksdwrld, who requested Harry/Snape and gave me the prompt of _Krampus makes an appearance. _I've researched Krampus, but apologize in advance for any mistakes in the story. The title of the story, "Psychopomp," means a guide to the land of the dead.

**Psychopomp**

Harry shivered and shoved his hands into his pockets. He enjoyed the Yule bonfire at Hogwarts, really he did, but every year his hands seemed to grow more sensitive to the cold.

He wandered slowly among the chattering witches and wizards. Here and there red hair showed up: Weasleys, all of them. Harry smiled at them. He hadn't become a part of the family by marrying Ginny, after all, but he had fully committed to helping their parents raise the next generation.

He absently dodged a chase that involved Percy's daughters, George's son, and at least two of Bill's children, and came to a stop away from the fire, staring into the darkness. No one went in the direction of the Forbidden Forest even now, of course. And they tended to stay away from the lake on a snowy night like this, too. The white gleam of Dumbledore's tomb was as far as most people wanted to venture from the castle.

_Why _go further? Harry knew a lot of people would ask. There was the fire here, and roasted meat and apples sparkling with sugar, and laughter and talk, and there would be fireworks later. There were a lot of people here, too, the former students who always came back since the Headmistress had taken to organizing this celebration after the war. Maybe he could find someone who would be willing to talk with the Boy-Who-Lived like an ordinary person, dance with him, flirt with him…

Harry sighed. He wanted to find someone, yes, but he didn't want any of these people, even the liveliest and most kind-hearted ones. Which made no sense, but there you were.

He turned away again, and took a step in the direction of the lake after all. It was perfectly safe, as long as he didn't stumble into the dark waters. And he could use a holiday from his own thoughts.

When he reached the shore, he realized the lake was frozen. Harry blinked and shivered, from the revelation more than anything else, casting a Warming Charm on himself as the cold made itself known. He wondered what the giant squid and the other denizens of the lake did in weather like this. Hagrid would probably know.

This time, he turned his head intending to seek out Hagrid and ask him, but jerked to a halt, staring, as he saw the face that looked before him.

As tall as Hagrid—no, maybe taller. But the face was downward-swept and shining, and there were horns looming above the brow, and the hair clustered around the face in a shaggy goat's beard and between the horns was far darker than Hagrid's. It looked as if it was made of clumps of fur thrown together, in fact. Harry blinked and took a step back.

"Nice costume," he managed to say, his voice not shaking because he refused to let it. "I'm sure you'll win the contest." He nodded and started to move away.

The figure stepped in front of him. This time, Harry could see more of the body as the firelight fell across it in thick stripes. Cloven hooves that moved and stamped in the snow with uneasy little steps, as though the figure wanted to intimidate Harry but wasn't sure if it was succeeding. Harry clenched his hands as he noticed the long whip coiled around one arm, bright-red as holly berries, and the smaller red thong dangling beside it. The thong came from the creature's _mouth_. It still took him longer than it should have to realize that it was a tongue.

"Who are you?" Harry asked quietly. "What are you?"

Someone else moved beside him. Harry didn't look around. If it was someone else human, he would welcome the confirmation that he wasn't mad and seeing apparitions. If it was a companion of the creature, Harry would gain nothing by turning to face it. That would just give this one more room to attack him, with his back turned.

And if the stranger still _was _someone in a spectacular costume and the other person was coming to laugh, Harry would be too relieved to care.

"Krampus," said a voice next to Harry.

Harry knew the voice. He swallowed and said, without taking his eyes from the creature named Krampus, "And what does it want, Professor Snape?"

"It is ridiculous in you to call me Professor, even now," said the deep, sneering voice that made memories speed through Harry's head. They weren't _pleasant _ones, but they were so vivid that some of the cold fell away.

"What does it want?" Harry repeated.

"And _equally _ridiculous for you to presume that I am the source of all knowledge."

Harry smiled. "You knew its name. I thought you might know what it wants." He gave a darting little step forwards. Krampus didn't move, and Harry danced back in time to keep from coming into contact with it. A quick glance around revealed that no one else seemed to have noticed. Krampus was probably visible only to him.

Well, and Snape. Harry would have to think about why later.

"It is traditionally supposed to punish naughty children," Snape said quietly. "To carry them off to Hell. To eat them. To drown them." He moved up, close enough that Harry could see his face from the corner of his eye, and nodded. Harry thought he was indicating the whip around Krampus's arm. "Perhaps this one came to beat you for all the crimes you have committed and not sufficiently paid for."

_That _finally made Harry relax. He turned to Snape, shaking his head. "I can conceive that it came to punish me," he said. "But not that I'm a child any longer."

Snape turned to face him, too, as though Krampus had ceased to be of any importance. "You are not?" he asked. "Although you would prefer that everything stay the same, that I should still be the same person with the same sources of knowledge, and that you can call me by the same name."

Harry blinked. It had been seven years since the war, and he had seen Snape little in all that time, but he'd written to him often. It didn't matter that his letters often brought curt replies or none. He didn't really want Snape to help him on cases—except when he paid him for that. He simply told him about changes in the laws that he thought would interest him, and times when people acknowledged Snape as the hero he really should be, and sometimes he told him something new he'd discovered about his mum. It was for self-comfort, really.

But he'd always called Snape "Professor" when he wrote. He thought it was only courteous, something Snape would expect of him.

Now he studied those narrowed, staring eyes, and the way that Snape stood with his head slanted downwards, his gaze fixed on Harry's neck rather than his face.

"I didn't know it bothered you," he said quietly. "Now that I know, I won't call you that anymore. Sorry, Snape."

Snape said nothing. Harry turned around to study Krampus, but it had vanished. Harry shook his head. He doubted he would ever know for sure if it had been someone in a costume or an evil spirit showing up for—God knew what reason.

"You will not keep that vow," Snape said abruptly. "In two months' time I'll receive another tedious letter from you with the same salutation at the top."

Harry flicked a glance at him. "I won't write to you, either," he said. He could feel his muscles coiling, something in him that had been relaxed curling up again around an old wound. He had helped Snape survive the bite that should have killed him, returning to the Shack and finding the bezoar Snape had just managed to swallow, but he had known better than to expect _gratitude _for that. It was just—he would have liked to think they had grown past this, to become something more.

They hadn't. Perhaps he had been a fool to try. Perhaps that had been what Krampus was telling him, that evil done once would always linger, and bad feelings were there to lash out like a whip when Harry thought they had gone away.

He started to walk off.

Snape's hand on his arm stopped him. He said nothing, and stood there like a statue, which was irritating, but the very fact that he had reached out was important. Harry stood there, too, until Snape met his eyes, full-on this time.

"I kept the letters," Snape said.

And that was all. That was all he would give, all he'd offer. Harry knew that revealing _that _much had probably cost him a lot. Harry could tear his arm free and storm off, justified in his dislike, and the wound he had felt reopening in him would open in Snape, too, and they would stand on either side of it as it steadily widened.

Sometimes Harry got tired of being the bigger person, the better person, reaching out and taking risks.

Not tonight. He touched Snape's arm in turn with his free hand, briefly, and said lightly, "Good. I tried as hard as I could to spell everything right."

Snape looked at him, and his eyes had no softness in them. It was the fact that he was looking that was the important thing, Harry knew.

Harry swallowed. Snape was near, and no one else had seen that apparition that he and Harry had. And he was warm. And his hand was still clamped down on Harry's arm as though to restrain him from some impetuous action, the way he had all through Harry's youth.

But _no one _could restrain Harry from impetuous action when he really wanted to try it, so he said, quietly, "The next time I write, which name should I use at the top?"

Snape moved closer without noise. "The salutation," he said, lips barely moving. "It's called the salutation, Potter."

Harry nodded. "I'm grateful for the knowledge, but the question stands."

Snape took another step closer, and he was taller than Krampus, and he didn't need horns to draw attention to his dark eyes, to his long face, to the question he was asking in silence and in dread.

Harry lifted his head, and answered the question with his lips as Snape answered it with, "Severus."

**The End.**


	15. On the Outside Looking In

**Title: **On the Outside Looking In

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco (past), Harry/OMC, Draco/Astoria

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **Heavy angst, mpreg, voyeurism (sort of)

**Wordcount:** 2200

**Summary: **If he had known, he wouldn't have made the decision he did. But he hadn't.

**Author's Notes: **Another one of my Advent fics, written at the request of allsmilesful_14, who wanted _Harry mpreg._ Here you are.

**On the Outside Looking In**

Draco stood there with his fingers locked into the palm of his right hand, and gazed and gazed at the tiny mirror cradled in the palm of his left hand.

The mirror reflected a small room where Harry Potter sat on a couch, his head tilted back, his mouth open as he snored. Someone who hadn't read the papers in the wizarding world for the past eight months might have been surprised about the sharp way his belly projected, or the exhaustion worked deep into the lines of his face, or the man who sat beside him, his hand gently stroking Harry's fringe back from his forehead.

Draco knew everything. But it didn't hurt less as he watched Edmund Cavalier touch Harry, or fetch water for him when he stirred awake, or quietly respond to his questions about what had happened that day among the Aurors.

_I should have known._

He hadn't, though. That was the problem. He hadn't known, and so he had listened to what Harry said when Harry told him they needed to have an important conversation, and his response had been as inappropriate as it possibly could be.

* * *

He'd laughed.

"What?" he said. "You're _pregnant_?" Then he shook his head. Harry might think Draco was laughing at the very notion of a man being pregnant, and it wasn't about that. He had to explain himself, especially since Harry was staring at him as though he'd walked in to find Draco fucking someone else. "It doesn't work like that. I mean, it can happen, but it only happens rarely, and only to pure-blood males. Someone whose heritage is so close to Muggleborn that they're still half that isn't going to get pregnant."

Harry shut his eyes for a minute. Then he said, "Well, can you argue with the Healer's report?" and held out a parchment to Draco.

Draco took the parchment and scanned it quickly, but snorted when he noticed that there was no St. Mungo's crest on it. "You went to that bloody independent practitioner of yours, didn't you?" he asked, handing it back. "The one who got kicked out of St. Mungo's for not recognizing dragonpox symptoms?"

"He got kicked out because he _reported _that it was dragonpox, and they told him it couldn't be, not when they'd eradicated it," Harry said coldly. "And when the scandal started up over those three people who died of it, they needed a scapegoat to throw to the bawling public."

Draco sighed. He'd always thought Harry too sympathetic to the young Healer he'd selected to treat him. Yes, Harry knew what it was like to be badly-treated by the public, but that was the only similarity between him and the other man.

"The fact remains that he's young, and hasn't seen everything," Draco pointed out. "I think that if you were pregnant, you would be showing by now."

Harry shook his head. "I've felt awful and had something wrong with my magic for three weeks now. He says that it's been since the night I conceived. Sometimes sensitive men show changes immediately after conception, because it's such a challenge to the body's magic. So I won't be showing when I'm less than a month along."

Draco narrowed his eyes. "I've never heard of such a thing."

"You're also not a Healer. Look, you can talk to him if you want—"

"He's _wrong_," Draco said harshly. He knew what he knew, and what he knew was a bloody sight more than Harry, who had come to the wizarding world so late and without the benefit of the tradition and education Draco had received from birth. "Go to another Healer. They'll tell you the truth, and then you can rest easy."

Harry looked at him, long and closely. Then he said, "He said it probably happened because I'm so powerful. Blood doesn't matter next to power. It's just that pure-blood wizards have traditionally thought of themselves as the strongest, so when one of them conceived, it was attributed to their heritage and not their magic."

"I hate to remind you of this, Harry, but you're _not _that fucking powerful," Draco snapped.

Harry went still and cold for a moment. Then he said, "I didn't show it when I defeated Voldemort, no." Draco winced, because Harry didn't usually use that name. Now, later, he would wonder about that. But then, he didn't. "But I've shown it to you since. You _know _my strength exists, Draco. I just prefer not to show it often, because it would mean that I was besieged by requests for help." He let one hand rest on his chest, then started and moved it down to his stomach, as though he had forgotten where the child would be—if there _was _a child, Draco thought, which there wasn't. "But it's there. And now it's done this."

"It hasn't."

Harry stared at him again. Then he said, "Why don't you go and speak to the Healer? He can show you the spells he performed. I don't know the names of all of them. But he could tell you, and he could convince you."

Draco took a step back, shaking his head. His breath was coming fast, small spots were dancing in his vision, and all he could think about was that this couldn't be coming true, not here, not now, when he had had no plans in place and sooner or later Harry would start showing and then _everyone would look at them and know._

"This can't be happening," he whispered. "I don't _want _them to know, Harry. You said that no one would have to know we were dating. You didn't tell my name to the Healer, did you?"

Harry's stillness was a deadly thing. But he said, as gently as though he was talking Draco off a cliff, "No. I didn't."

"But you must see how impossible it would be for me to visit him," Draco went on. "And you must see how impossible it would be for you to be pregnant, because that would mean—things would change, and how would people react to their Savior dating a Death Eater?"

"We could discuss that," Harry said. "I did want to go public, remember? But I didn't, because I love you, Draco, and I knew you didn't want to. We can discuss it now." His eyes were bright again, but that stillness was still coiled in the bottom of his muscles, and he reached out a hand. "We can discuss what to do. Maybe your parents would help us with the child, or Narcissa could tell us a good, painless way to get rid of it."

Draco shook his head until his hair blurred in front of his eyes. His parents would never agree to get rid of the baby, he knew. Not their grandchild. And he knew, likewise, that they would never forgive him for finding out that he was involved with Harry Potter, instead of free for the marriage they had been preparing for him.

"You would get rid of it, if I asked you to?" he asked, his voice high.

"I love you more than anything else," Harry said, looking at him squarely. His hand was still stretched out. "But we need to discuss it, and you need to believe that there's a baby, first." His smile was slight.

"But you would, if I asked you to," Draco insisted. His heart was ringing in his ears.

"We need to—"

"If I just _asked _you to?"

"Draco, we have to—"

"I don't want to discuss it, Harry!" He was yelling now, and his hands were pressed against the front of his stomach as though he was the one who would have some dangerous, deadly, secret-revealing burden tumble out of him in a few months. "I want you to just get rid of it! You told me once that you would do anything for me, _anything!_ Well, do this!"

Harry dropped his hand. They stood there. He was coiled up like a cobra, and Draco was panting like a rabbit, and there was silence flowing between them until Harry spoke again, low and passionless.

"I said that I would do anything for you because I really believed that you would do anything for me in return," Harry said, his voice slow, low, cold. "But that's not true, is it? You won't defy your parents. You won't come out in public. You won't believe me when I say I'm pregnant. You won't do _anything _that I ask you to. And for a long time, I was content with that, as long as you shared your life with me. But this isn't like anything else, Draco. I need you to—"

"_Get rid of it!_"

Harry stood there, and looked at him, and all the coiled strength and power Draco had denied he had drew itself up in him until Draco knew that he would have been in less danger if he was in the room with the Dark Lord.

"Not when you say it like that," Harry said, and turned his back. "Get out."

Draco stared at him. "You can't just act like this only affects one of us, Harry," he said, through numb lips. "If you _are_, and you show, and people start asking questions about me, if they find out I'm—"

"It always comes back to you, and nothing else," Harry said, and turned around. His green eyes were savage, and his power lashed out, once, twice, like whips from behind his head. Draco flinched as plates shattered around him, as cupboards flung open, as chairs rose from the floor and began to rotate. "You're so bloody _afraid _that you don't care about me, or this child, or the future, or anything else. _Out_."

Draco backed up, his eyes on Harry. He wanted to say something else, but his fear choked him.

"I should have known better than to date someone so self-interested." Harry's lips pulled back from his teeth until he looked like a werewolf. "Get _out_."

And Draco went.

* * *

Now Harry and Edmund, in the mirror, were talking about something related to Harry's latest Healer's appointment. They were laughing, and they were eating Muggle crisps out of a bag, and it was all disgustingly domestic.

Draco closed his eyes. He would have dropped the mirror, but his hand remained clenched around it, as though his fingers didn't belong to him.

Harry hadn't stayed in the house he'd thrown Draco out of, perhaps because it was (secretly, through a chain of Memory Charms on the people who had helped them purchase it) half Draco's property, too. He had moved in with the Weasleys for a time, and then in with his Auror partner, Edmund Cavalier, when his refusal to answer questions about who was the child's other parent had caused a row with his friends. As far as Draco knew, he had repaired that row, but the curiosity was bright and present in their eyes whenever they visited Harry.

But Harry had never betrayed him. Draco could still go on and have the normal marriage his parents desired for him, something they were arranging as fast as they could now that they knew Draco would go along with it. His betrothal to Astoria Greengrass was set to begin as soon as they'd been properly introduced.

Cavalier didn't sleep with Harry. He supported Harry the way he had in the field: gave him his couch and then his bed, accompanied Harry to Healer's appointments, asked silly questions about the child's name that made Harry relax around him. And now he sat beside him, and ate from the same plate as Harry, and laughed with him, and touched him.

No, he didn't sleep with him, and Draco didn't think Harry was in love with him. But it was plain what Cavalier wanted, and now that Harry had decided to keep the baby, he would win Harry's heart by being kind to his child.

_Draco's _child. The child they should have decided together to have, or not.

Draco glanced back once more into the mirror. Cavalier and Harry were watching Muggle telly and laughing.

It felt as though Draco hadn't laughed since that day.

No, Harry hadn't betrayed him. He might not welcome Draco if he tried to walk back into Harry's life, but Draco was fairly sure Harry wouldn't prevent him from visiting his son or daughter, either, if he wanted.

But Draco couldn't. The fear froze him whenever he tried.

He lowered the mirror and stood there, shivering, choked with the endless, ravaging terror.

"Draco?" his mother called gently from below. "It's time to dress for the party, son."

Draco moistened his lips and took one more look in the mirror, at the life he could have had, and then turned and called back to his mother, towards the life he would lead.

**The End.**


	16. A Broken Triumph

**Title: **A Broken Triumph

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters; I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Threesome: **Snape/Harry/Draco

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Angst, minor character death

**Wordcount:** 1200

**Summary: **In the wake of his mother's death, Severus and Harry help Draco come to terms.

**Author's Notes: **This is another of my Advent fics, for 0idontknow0 , who gave me a prompt for Harry/Draco/Severus and the following quote: "I'll fix these broken things, repair your broken wings, and make sure everything's all right" - Maroon 5, _This Love_.

**A Broken Triumph**

Draco stood by the window.

Beneath him, the snow lay silent and still on the grass. Draco had expected winds to come and blow it about, at least. There were almost always winds with snow like this, near their hidden house in Godric's Hollow. But instead there was white, and silver, undisturbed.

It reminded him of his mother's face as she lay on the floor, but he couldn't turn away from it any more than he had been able to turn away from her as he fell to his knees, cradling her head and smoothing her hair away from her cheeks. He had called her name, knowing there would be no answer.

A step from one room into another, and the bursting of a heart that none of them had known was weak. His mother had never seen a Healer who could have identified the weakness for her, and probably would have laughed if she had. Who could predict the future? That had been one of her favorite sayings after the war and the unexpected way everything had turned out.

Probably including the people Draco had fallen in with and fallen in love with, come to that.

So he stood and looked at the snow, and kept looking until he felt one hand on his right shoulder and another on his left. Then he leaned back, closed his eyes, and let his breath out in a single, long, low, painful note.

They didn't speak. At least, not right now. There were no words that would make it better. But Draco knew what they had come for, and let them turn him, draw him away from the window.

He faced them.

Severus was the darker of the two at all times, wearing black robes even to bed. He watched Draco now without moving, letting him choose the time when he would lean forwards and collapse against Severus's chest. His hair was long and brushed straight back, his eyes deep, his face still. His hand was on Draco's left shoulder, and never moved, even as Harry stepped behind him and wrapped his arms around Draco's chest, bowing his face into Draco's shoulder, murmuring wordlessly.

Harry was the restless one, the bright one. If Draco turned around, he was sure he would see his eyes gleaming green, for all that the only light in the room came from the dim embers of the fire and the starlight reflecting off the snow. His hands fluttered up and down Draco's muscles, and his cheek rested on Draco's hair and darted away again, and his breath was as soft and quick as the kiss of a hummingbird's wing on the nape of Draco's neck.

Draco reached out with both hands, and caught Severus's shoulder with one arm and Harry's neck with the other as Harry moved in for another kiss.

They both stood there, still, for another moment. Draco could taste his heart in his own mouth, and he held it there for a long moment, the taste of blood and copper, the deep, strong beat that pulsed through him and made him turn with his mouth open to Harry first.

Harry kissed him carefully, his fingers so deep in Draco's hair that he couldn't turn his head. He didn't need to turn his head, though. He knew Severus hovered there, and his fingers were light as they opened Draco's robe from the back, with buttons and a crease that Severus had put there solely for his convenience.

Draco closed his eyes and thought of the way that his mother had fallen, how he'd heard the thump, how he'd called to her assuming she'd dropped something, and how she'd not answered. He'd sped through the doorway and there she was, and then he had knelt down beside her.

He opened his eyes and saw the green gleam he had known would be there, the way Harry smiled, the way he held his arms open this time. Draco came into them and leaned on his chest.

His robes fell away, pulled down from behind by Severus.

Draco leaned back, bending over the curve of his spine, enough that he could bring his mouth into alignment with Severus's. Severus kissed as gravely and as patiently as he'd ever directed Draco to pour boiling liquid into a cauldron, with his eyes open. Draco couldn't meet them in the darkness, but that didn't matter. He knew they were there, and that was what mattered most.

Then Severus's hands were on his back, pushing, kneading, forcing him down and towards the floor, and Draco went, bowing his head, letting his hands splay out before him, and feeling Harry hover for a moment before he chose his role and dropped down to his own knees to kiss Draco again.

Draco kissed and licked, and Harry opened his mouth under the kisses soon enough, his tongue darting out, his head pulling back, his eyes alive with one bright blaze of mischief. Then he lay down on the thick rug beneath him—which Draco could feel whispering and crunching beneath his hands—and spread his arms and legs and fingers, beckoning.

Draco crawled and slunk over him, legs mingling with legs, knees banging into knees, heads twisting to find lips. Severus was behind him, still, and then inside him, and Draco had to still and sigh and accept the sudden twist and pressure of fingers, instead of gasping or screaming aloud, the way he wanted to.

This had _never _been about gasping or screaming aloud, as much as he sometimes wanted to.

Severus kept silent and attentive for long moments, his fingers working in and out, impossibly slick; Draco hadn't heard him cast the spell. Deep, they probed, and then Severus sat back and eased into Draco.

Harry gasped beneath Draco. Draco smiled against his lips and ground down, his cock against Harry's, flesh making its own slickness. Harry always needed more preparation than Draco did before Severus could take him, and each time, he seemed enthralled anew that they were so different.

Harry rocked Draco now, arms tight around him, while Severus was tight inside him, pushing and thrusting, sometimes moving both him and Harry forwards, sometimes moving the rug. Draco shut his eyes and did nothing, even his hands falling limp. He let himself be cradled, stroked, shoved, moved.

The image of the pale face behind his eyes shimmered, shimmered like the snow, and shattered like all images did when Severus and Harry, working him between them, handling him like a beloved, a toy, a dream, made him come.

Draco gasped aloud, but was otherwise soundless, yielding, pulling, enjoying. Harry's laughter was an explosion of breath against his collarbone, a rush of slickness. Severus followed last, grave as always, his body only showing a slight quickness as he gave in.

Then they lay together, their hands entwined, their bodies stuck, their breaths winding around each other in a cloud of warmth.

Draco stretched out his hands and found fingers waiting for him, and beneath the skin, pulses. Steady and strong behind him, rapid and dancing in front of him.

And, at last, he could enter a different kind of quiet.

**The End.**


	17. Dare to Know

**Title: **Dare to Know

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Warnings: **Angst, references to violence, creature!fic (Harry is a werewolf)

**Rating: **R

**Wordcount:** 2100

**Summary: **The bite happened in public, and destroyed so much that Harry would have taken for granted just a little while ago—like public favor. But there was still one sanctuary open to him.

**Author's Notes: **Another of my Advent fics, this one for Enamoril, who asked for Harry being turned into a werewolf and having to come to Draco to hide from the Ministry.

**Dare to Know**

Harry would have thought the bite would happen in a forest, with the full moon blazing overhead, the shadows shifting around him, the panting mouth and bright teeth defining reality for him. If he had ever thought seriously about the possibility of being turned into a werewolf, which he hadn't.

But it had happened in the middle of a Ministry corridor, when a werewolf that had come to the Ministry for Wolfsbane and already begun transforming as he sought to escape custody. Harry caught a glimpse of flying grey fur, the claws gleaming like silver nails, the gaping mouth—that part was the same—and then the fangs as they sank into his arm.

_Everyone _saw it. Harry was on his way to a Ministry function, one that was supposed to celebrate the peaceful relations that had endured for a long time now between the wizarding community and magical creatures. He wore the heavy, gold-studded formal robes that the Minister had pressed on him years ago, and that might be another reason why he hadn't managed to get his wand up in time to defend himself.

In the way the circle around him widened the next moment, as people backed away—even though it was his _zero _full moon, really, and he wouldn't transform until the next one—Harry saw the way it would be. The pointing. The stares. The whispers. The attempts, soon or late, to cage him, to force him to register, to deny him basic rights, or use the threat of losing them to force him to stop speaking up against the Ministry.

Everyone was too busy staring avidly at the changed Boy-Who-Lived to even capture the werewolf, who had leaped over the shoulders of the Minister and his guards and was rampaging towards the outer Ministry and the guests who waited there.

Harry cast a Stunner after it, and knew from the collapse of a heavy body that he'd hit his target. Some of his audience blinked and looked a little embarrassed, but no one came near him.

Harry saw the future, and he forced it to change, in his own way. He touched the Portkey fastened to the top of his robes, looking like an ordinary pearl button, and landed in a swirl of colors in his home. Then he took a deep breath, thought about the pressures that would fall on the lives of those who loved him, and reached for the book on life-debts that stood on the highest shelf of his study, the one he had always promised Hermione he would read someday.

He would read it now. He would find out the provisions for seeking sanctuary of someone who owed you a life-debt, and he would go to Draco Malfoy and ask to stay in the Manor until he figured out what to do.

* * *

Draco opened his door, and stared. He had never really expected to see Harry Potter on his doorstep, and the sight made him rub his eyes, not because they hurt but because he felt he _had _to distrust them if this was the sight they brought him.

"I'm claiming the life-debt you owe me," Potter said, holding his eyes. "You'll know why first, of course." He turned his arm, and Draco recognized the ragged wound on his arm. Hard not to, when he'd had Fenrir Greyback living in his house and seen him inflict the same kind of injury on people the Dark Lord wanted to punish. "I have a month until I first transform. I'll find a place to go before then, and a way to get hold of Wolfsbane. Until then, I need somewhere to stay where no one would think of looking for me."

Draco stared at him some more. Memories of the year immediately after the war, which he otherwise didn't like to think of, were returning to him. Potter had, after all, stood on his doorstep once before this, to give him back his wand.

And Draco—

Of course he had to honor his life-debts, that was something he'd always known, but it was the memory of Potter then, as he'd been, and the sight of him now, in torn formal robes, the autumnal light falling around him, face set in perfect determination, that made him step back with a nod and gesture Potter in.

* * *

Harry critically eyed the crescent moon. He could feel it pulling on him, the way he thought it probably pulled on the tides. His blood rose in eager answer, and he had a vision of himself running on all fours through a forest, his mouth wet with the gore of the kill.

Harry shrugged. So it was a vision. So it was a pull. He felt that, and acknowledged it. It didn't mean he had to _obey _the bloody thing and go outside to rampage up and down.

A knock came on his door. Harry turned around. He knew who it would be. House-elves didn't knock. "Come in."

Malfoy stepped in and nodded to him. "Your contact came through. The first dose of Wolfsbane is waiting in a sealed vial in the library."

Harry smiled. He hadn't dared involve his friends—he had sent them one cryptic owl telling them he was safe, and that was it—but he knew people from the Ministry who would do anything for money, and they had proved useful. "Thanks. I'm almost sure, now, that I know the location of that supposedly Unplottable property my ancestors owned in Scotland. I'm going to go there in just a week. I'll be out of your hair long before the full moon comes around, Malfoy, I swear."

Malfoy just stood there, looking at him. Harry cocked his head. "What?" He'd told the truth so far, and even offered Malfoy Galleons he'd cleaned out of Gringotts to pay for his upkeep, although Malfoy had curtly refused that. Only with more extensive reading in the book about life-debts had Harry learned that compensation offered for the life-debt was an insult.

But other than that, he'd behaved perfectly politely, and he would keep his word about being gone before the full moon. He didn't understand why Malfoy was staring at him now like Harry was a strange insect he'd found under one of his collection vials.

Malfoy shook his head, said, "I know you will," and then turned and left the room. Harry smiled at his back and looked up at the moon again.

* * *

Potter had changed, and not in the wild luster of his eyes and the way that his hair seemed even shaggier than ever now, although he'd done nothing different with it.

He was quiet, composed, thoughtful. Determined. That was the best word, Draco thought, as he watched Potter reading books and exercising behind a Disillusionment Charm in the Manor gardens and startling the house-elves less each day. Potter would have collapsed under such a challenge once, Draco was sure, unable to process the difference. Or he would have fled into his friends' arms and railed that the world wasn't fair. And maybe he would have found a way, as the Golden Boy, to change his fate.

But this time, he didn't do that. He simply carried on with his best attempt to make an independent life for himself—independent of all the chains the Ministry would have placed on him, independent of the friends who, in their concern for him, could have been targets. He refused the world the option to pity him.

And as Draco watched him gliding through the corridors, watched the courteous way Potter inclined his head to him when they met, watched him read and absorb knowledge about werewolves and wizards in other countries and pure-blood customs so that he could live a different kind of life and not be helpless when he did, Draco realized something else.

Self-confidence made Potter devastatingly attractive. Werewolf bite and all.

* * *

The moon was waxing, and so was the restlessness in Harry's blood. It was good that this was the last day he would spend in Malfoy Manor, he thought, as he slid the books Malfoy had agreed he could borrow into his bag. He would send them back by owl when he'd finished with them, or, more likely, made or bought fair copies of them. Sometimes he thought that he'd never be finished learning all the different things he could in this new life.

"How long do you plan to stay at your property in Scotland?"

Harry looked up. Malfoy stood near him—nearer than Harry had thought he would stand once Harry's werewolf traits started manifesting them ever more strongly. It wasn't that he believed Malfoy had a particular monopoly on fear, but he had lived in the same house with Fenrir Greyback, and Harry was thinking more about the perceptions of people around him than he ever had. Remembering more about them. Trying to anticipate what they would fear.

"I don't know," he said now. "Probably a few months, anyway, as long as I need to put together a routine. It would be dangerous to stay too long. I'll go abroad as soon as I have a destination in mind and have enough research on it to feel comfortable going there."

Malfoy closed his eyes, as if silently debating with himself even as he spoke. "You shouldn't let them drive you away from your home."

Harry straightened up. "I don't want to fight this battle," he said, low and sharp. The bite had changed his voice, not adding a growl to it but rather a clarity, as if he could sing across miles. "I didn't choose _this_," and he gestured to the long white scar on his arm. "But I chose this life. I choose to live free, and deal with what happened to me on my own, without struggling with the bloody public who think they have a say in what should happen to me. That's that."

"I mean," Malfoy said, and hesitated. "Would it help if you had help in your battle?"

"Maybe," Harry said. "But Hermione's version of help isn't something I can tolerate right now. And Ron and his family still have enough bad memories of what Greyback did to Bill. Maybe, years down the line, I'll want what they can do for me. But not right now."

Malfoy took a step nearer. "There are other people who might fight for you," he said. "Because they want to, and in a different way than the legal help Granger would try to get you. People who know secrets about some of your opponents in the Ministry. People who wouldn't try to make you into an example for all werewolves. People who—know what it's like to feel despised and rejected by the wizarding world."

Harry did some staring of his own, the way Malfoy had been looking at him for days now. Then he said, "But why would you want to? A life-debt isn't worth that much."

* * *

Draco held Potter's eyes. Wild, deep green as forests, bright as hope, calm as the future.

"Because I want to," Draco said, and moved closer, closer, closer. Potter was warm, not cold as Greyback had been. Strongly-muscled, graceful, poised like a wild animal. Getting close to a wild animal was dangerous, but it was the kind of thing that could give you a deep, breathless thrill as you did it.

Draco looked into Potter's eyes, and held out his hands, and said, "Because I dreaded the full moon not because you would turn for the first time, but because I knew it meant you would leave."

Potter examined him some more. Draco watched his nostrils widen and wondered if Potter even knew that he was using his nose as well as his eyes and ears to ascertain the truth of Draco's intentions.

And then Potter smiled.

The smile was shattering, brilliant. Draco took Potter's hands this time, and Potter didn't move away.

"You're sure," Potter said, with no questions.

"I am," Draco said, and kissed him, wondering for a moment if he would feel fangs against his lips.

Nothing like fangs, but everything like hope, and wonder, and curiosity, and Potter's tongue lapping like any dog's or human's, and Draco opened his mouth to the future.

**The End.**


	18. From Inside the Morning

**Title: **From Inside the Morning

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco, Luna/OMC

**Warnings: **Angst

**Rating: **PG-13

**Wordcount:** 3500

**Summary: **One holiday to Japan. One night. One long, running argument.

**Author's Notes: **This is another of my Advent fics, for ghighines's request of _Draco/Harry Established Relationship sorta. They are going to a friends wedding in Japan. They are going through a rough patch in their relationship and a visit to an overnight temple is where they start working things through. It's not pretty. Happy ending. _Here you are. I apologize in advance for any mistakes in Japanese language or landscape; they are entirely my own. The imaginary temple in this story is based (in looks) on the Kinkaku Ji Temple in Kyoto.

**From Inside the Morning**

"You never told me why you wanted to come here."

"To see Luna." Harry kept his eyes focused straight ahead of him as he leaned on the slender railing around the temple, staring at the water. The pool rippled with the light of the setting sun, what little reflection leaked through the high clouds, and a small breeze moved through the leaves of the trees off to the side. Harry feared he didn't appreciate it properly, though, and couldn't as long as his lover's annoyed voice sounded in his ears. "You know that."

"Not here, Japan. _Here, _this temple." Draco was prowling around him, kicking pebbles and making enough noise that Harry winced and glanced over his shoulder. Luna had told them that there would be few people in the temple tonight, but _still_. "Why?"

"I thought it would be _relaxing_," Harry snapped, and whirled away, towards the temple itself. It was yellow, not the color of gold but the color of autumn leaves. It looked as if it had two floors above the ground one, but no one moved on those floors. Harry walked under the bigger awning, and then stopped.

Draco followed him. "You thought _what, _and _why_?" he demanded.

But Harry was getting tired of accounting for his thoughts to Draco. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, trying to let the atmosphere inside the temple cascade down the back of his neck, soothe the muscles, wash the irritation away. People had walked and prayed and thought and explained here for hundreds of years, Harry thought, and places picked up the resonance of what was done inside them, especially wizarding places. If he could absorb a small bit of that deep thought, then maybe he could solve his problems with Draco.

"Why?" Draco repeated, his voice like the buzzing of a wasp.

Harry turned around and glared at him. "You know that this isn't the place to have this row, Draco," he said, keeping his voice low to model good behavior, and walked further into the temple. The floor creaked softly underneath him. The shadows inside the temple seemed deeper than Harry had reckoned on, and he paused uncertainly.

"_Lumos_," Draco drawled from behind him, and the shadows sprang away. "Honestly, sometimes you forget you're a wizard."

_Apparently this is the best place for the argument, after all. _Harry turned around, his shoulders hunched and his hair standing on end along the nape of his neck.

This was supposed to be their _holiday_. Luna had gone to Japan some years ago to study one of her imaginary creatures and had met a man named Sato Botan, a Japanese wizard who tended populations of the Triple-Horned Snorkack, which turned out not to be so imaginary after all. Luna had decided to marry him—or maybe Botan had decided to marry her; Harry wasn't sure about which—and had invited Ron, Hermione, Harry, and, impartially, Draco, to her wedding. Harry had hoped being in another country could help him and Draco simply enjoy each other's company for once.

But because Draco had decided to carry this _stupid _argument with them, that wasn't going to happen.

"And that's the problem, isn't it?" he asked. "You can never forget that I was raised Muggle. I heard what you said about me to your friends at Christmas."

Draco's eyes widened with true surprise before he turned his head away and shrugged. "It's only true, yes. You forget to use simple charms to clean up after yourself, and you expect my friends not to remark on crumbs?"

"With Gregory as one of their friends," Harry said tightly, "yes."

Draco flinched, but Harry stood his ground. The same friends, mostly Parkinson and Bulstrode, who made outraged and shocked comments about Harry in low voices tolerated Gregory Goyle biting into a chocolate cake and spewing bits of it when he laughed. There was no difference in manners there, except that Harry's were better. It always and ever came down to blood.

Hell, Harry thought, Draco had probably only pursued him in the first place because he was one of the richest and most influential wizards in the world following Voldemort's defeat. What Harry couldn't fathom was why Draco _stayed _with him. He had to know by now that he couldn't make Harry over in his own pure-blood image.

"Pansy and Millicent are accustomed to better entertainment than they found in your house that night," Draco said, and turned his head away, a graceful motion of his neck that Harry used to admire until he realized it led to Draco being a stubborn bloody _martyr _about everything. "Yes, I said what I said to soothe ruffled feelings. That's all."

Harry smiled tightly. Draco might not realize what he had just said, but Harry did. Draco had taught him that, the quickness to insult and notice nuances.

"Don't you mean _our _house?" he asked innocently.

Draco faced him, arms crossed, his wand projecting towards a corner so that the shadows came back again. Not that Harry needed to see Draco's face. He knew what expression would be on it.

"That's what I said," Draco insisted.

Harry shook his head. Of all Draco's argument tactics, he hated most the one where Draco insisted that Harry couldn't trust his own ears or eyes. Harry knew perfectly well what he'd said, and that Draco was being an idiot.

"You said my house," he said quietly. "It's still not your home." He paused, and a moment trembled between them like a raindrop. Harry was the one who made the drop fall, who spoke the words that had been forever coming, and not long enough. "Why don't you just leave, Draco? You don't like me, you don't consider my house yours even though we've lived together for years, and you pick at me all the time. I can _see _you're not happy, and I can't make you that way, because my manners are never good enough no matter what and my blood isn't going to change. Why are you tying yourself down? Go _away_."

Draco stood there, staring at him, his arms drooping as though he had started to fold them and then forgotten why he was doing it. In the silence, Harry watched the light from his wand, and looked up into his face, and couldn't bring himself to regret his words.

_Maybe this was a good idea after all. Not relaxing, but it helped me say things that needed to be said. _Harry wondered idly if the deep thoughts here had included heated arguments.

"You don't mean that," Draco said.

Harry turned away, pushing his fringe up and away from his forehead. "There you go again, telling me that I don't mean something or I didn't do something that I'm bloody sure I _do _mean, or _do _do," he said wearily. "It's another reason for you to leave. Go and get a partner you can trust more. I'm done."

He started to walk towards the far side of the temple. There might be something to see there. And he didn't light his own wand. Perversely, he liked the thought of being plunged into darkness when Draco left.

Draco followed him, though, his voice holding the low, wary bafflement that he'd shared the first time he realized that Harry bought birthday presents for _all _the Weasleys, not just Ron and Hermione. "You don't mean that because you don't want me gone," he said.

Harry reached a small space of bare floor that he sank down onto. There was a spill of dust in front of him, and he traced his fingers lightly through it. "I don't want you gone," he said quietly. "I love you. But I'd rather love you from a distance than have you tell me, over and over, that I'm wrong, and I don't need this, and I don't love that, and I need to change when I can't please you anyway."

"This isn't _really _all about that thing I said to my friends at Christmas, is it?" Draco demanded. "You can't be _that _offended that I admitted I wished you were cleaner, and cleaned up after yourself more."

"You didn't say that, Draco," Harry said through gritted teeth. "You said _dirty, _that you wished I wasn't so _dirty_. That I wasn't so _muddy_."

A startled silence. Then Draco said, "I didn't mean it like that. I was talking about the time you tracked mud into the house."

"No," Harry said, smiling bleakly at the wall. "I heard the whole conversation. You were talking about crumbs on the table, and the handprints I left on the wall when we had sex there, and the hair in the tub. Not mud."

Draco was quiet. Harry was quiet. Now it did seem as though the thoughts of the people who had prayed here had entered into them, because Harry could feel his thoughts slowing down and his breathing slowing.

Draco broke it again, of course. "I sometimes slip into those metaphors when I spend time around my friends," he mumbled. "It's not my fault."

Harry turned his hands outwards. "Then whose is it? Mine? Because if you still think that way about me after years of being together, Draco…nothing _will _change. I can't change who my mother was to please you. And I wouldn't if I could," he added, because he knew the way Draco's brain worked and the question he was heading towards. "I like my mum. I like knowing that she saved my life, if she couldn't be alive to be around me. I don't _want _to change things. That's the way it is."

Draco's breathing retreated into quietness again. Then he said, "It's not as though you're good to me all the time, either."

"I know," Harry said wearily, bowing his head and massaging his forehead. The pain that was coming on was the kind that would last for a few hours, at least. "I know I argued with you about going public and that I don't get along well with your friends. But that just means that we're wrong together, and all the people who told us we were bad for each other were right."

"I _refuse _to let them be right."

Harry blinked and looked up. "What?"

Draco stood in front of him—Harry hadn't even heard him rise—arms folded and with the glare that had challenged the Fiendfyre and the press and all the Weasleys when they came in teary-eyed, mostly because Ginny had been teary-eyed at the news Harry was gay and not because they inherently hated the idea. Harry rocked a little with the force of that gaze, and wished he could look away, but from the way his eyes stayed locked on Draco, that wasn't an option.

"I refuse to let them be right," Draco repeated, softly, harshly. "The thought that they're right and we can't be together is _intolerable _to me. Let's work this out."

Harry laughed wearily. "We've tried that already, Draco. There's nothing left. It always founders, and we yell at each other, and then have sex later, and accomplish nothing."

"Sex isn't _nothing_."

"But it isn't what we _need_." Harry pressed his palms to his eyes. The headache was growing worse, and the thought of another "session" where he and Draco tried to work everything out made it worse. "Let me go. Please."

"That means you can't walk away from me on your own," Draco said, satisfaction in his voice.

Harry glared at him. "I always think you're least attractive when you're gloating over someone else's pain," he snapped.

"_Gloating_," Draco said, in a tone so deep that Harry was actually tempted to back away from it, and took a step forwards. It looked as though Draco just stopped himself in time, and then he stood there shaking his head. "You think that's what I'm doing. You think…that's what I'm doing."

"Yes," Harry said. "And you needn't repeat yourself. You can't change my mind that way."

"Then how can I?" Draco edged nearer again. "Because we don't agree, and we shouldn't be together, but you've admitted that you don't want me to leave. How can I change your mind so that we both agree, the way we should?"

Harry ran his hands through his hair, and ignored the cluck of Draco's tongue. The fact that he cared so much about the way Harry looked when Harry had long ago given up on it was only another reason they weren't suited. "You can't change," Harry said. "You've made it clear that you don't want to, and I'm unfair for asking you to do it."

Draco shook his head. "I refuse to accept that."

"_Another _reason we aren't suited," Harry pointed out. "We can't fucking compromise."

"Or compromise fucking," Draco said, and sighed when Harry didn't smile. "Listen. I want—I want to be with you, and not only when we're fucking. And the stupid little comments I make to my friends don't mean much. I don't _mean _them, not the way I mean what I say to you when we're alone."

"But that includes more comments on my appearance, and my hair, and my clothes, and the way I eat, and my friends." Harry shook his head. "If you didn't want to change me, then maybe we could be together, Draco. But that's really the whole core of the problem. You can't even wait to argue with me about my smallest perceptions. I think you're being abrupt, and you have to say that I must be imagining things. Not even that you _weren't_ abrupt. You degrade the way I look at the world, and you wonder that I find you exasperating?"

Draco stood there, and blinked. Harry blinked back. He had only said what he was thinking, and he was sure he must have done that at least once before. But Draco was acting as shocked as though Harry had really given him new information.

Finally, Draco whispered, "Do I really—degrade the way you look at the world all that often?"

"You've done it already since we've been here." Harry turned to look out the temple's doorway, since being inside had yet to bring him peace. He could see the water that way, and the trees, although they were dim shadows now that the sun had set. "Telling me what you think I really mean, whether or not that's what _I _think I mean. I don't want that, Draco. I could put up with the insults and the way you talk to your friends about me, but not the insistence that I must really look at the world this particular way, when I _know _I don't."

Draco stood there with his head bowed. Harry hoped he was indulging in some serious thinking, but he didn't know if he should hope for that or not.

Then Draco said, "What if I promised—really promised—that I wouldn't do that anymore?"

"You don't even notice you're doing it," Harry said, eyeing him. "How can you promise to stop something like that?"

Draco took a deep, silent breath, one that reminded Harry of the way Luna had stood breathing in her husband's breath this afternoon, after a soft conversation they'd had about their wedding.

"I never want you to _permanently _change," Draco said at last. "Even your horrible hair. You represent a challenge, and that's what I want the most from you. If you—if you challenge me some more, if you tell me when I'm doing it, and you tell me to _stop _doing it, I won't take that the wrong way."

Harry gaped at him. Draco had never said before why he wanted to be with Harry, other than offhand comments to his friends about money and power and looks. Harry had never taken the looks part of that equation seriously, either, not when Draco was always pushing at him to change.

Now he remembered the time that he _had _put on a pair of new robes to go to a party at Parkinson's house, because Draco had been so sharp about Harry not embarrassing him. And when he had come downstairs, Draco had stared at him for a little while, and then asked him in a choked voice to please go back up and change. Harry had assumed his choice of new robes was worse than the old one, because that was the sort of fashion problem Draco was always accusing him of.

It seemed, though, that it might have come from Draco's astonishment that Harry had given in to him for once.

"You seriously won't?" Harry asked.

"I love you," Draco said, though with a little grimace that made it look as though saying that caused him physical pain. "I love the way you challenge me, and the way that you stand up to me, and the way you fight back when I'm trying to—I don't know, pin you to the bed or something. I wouldn't be with you if I didn't like that. I know I don't say it often, and I'm sorry. But I do like you for who you are."

"Muddy blood and all," Harry said.

Draco shook his head. "I _don't _mean that, any more than you mean the nasty remarks you sometimes make about Slytherins when you're with your friends. I'll try to keep in mind that you don't like it, but at the time, I didn't mean it. It slipped out." He met Harry's eyes and held them. "I wouldn't touch you, wouldn't be with you, if I really believed that about you, Harry. You _know _it."

And he did know it, Harry had to admit. Draco complained about him and picked at him and battled him, but he touched Harry with reverent hands, and had rushed Harry to hospital when he'd hurt himself in a stupid accident with a terrible look on his face, and the one time he had come to Harry's help in an actual battle situation, the way he'd reacted to someone else spilling Harry's blood was terrifying. Meanwhile, the rest of the Slytherins who really believed that way could barely tolerate being in the same house as Harry.

"Okay," Harry said, shaking his head a little. "And I'll try to keep in mind that I like fighting with you, too."

Draco's mouth crooked. "I don't _think _you like it as much as I do."

Harry grinned. "It doesn't express itself the same way, but why do you think that I'm always talking about your friends, or Slytherins, or pure-bloods, or some other group that I know you'll come to the defense of?"

Draco rocked back on his heels, evidently thinking of some of the occurrences of the last five years that he hadn't considered in-depth at the time. Then he said, "You little _shit_."

Harry smiled at him. "Well, yeah. But you seemed so serious about the things you said to me that I never thought of them the same way. If it was for the sake of arguments, then I can think of it differently."

Draco rolled his eyes. "The way I look during those rows is just one of the differences between us. Stop being so sensitive."

"Maybe now I finally can," Harry said, taking a step towards him, "now that I know—well, that I can challenge you if you tell me that I'm oversensitive, or wearing stupid robes. I want to be with you, Draco. You're right about that. I didn't _want _to let you go. But it seemed to be making us both so unhappy."

"I would be unhappier without you," Draco said, catching his arms. "And I'll try to show you that you would be, too." He hesitated, then added, "I'll try to speak more openly like this, more honestly, if you need it."

"I'd like it," Harry corrected. "But that you did it once already—and even _apologized_—is a huge help."

Draco scowled at him. "My apologies aren't that rare."

"Name three of them in the last year," Harry pointed out, drawing nearer.

"I meant the apology I gave you just now," Draco said, and then paused to think, his forehead wrinkling in a way that Harry found adorable, but also knew meant that Draco might be standing there and thinking forever.

Harry kissed him instead.

* * *

Morning found them looking out from inside the temple, two arguments past, their eyes on the trees and the water and the rising sun.

And their hands linked. Harry rubbed Draco's knuckles and thought, _Yeah, we'll be all right._

**The End.**


	19. Defender's Armor

**Title: **Defender's Armor

**Disclaimer: **J.K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Snape (mostly pre-slash).

**Warnings:** A bit of angst, AU in that Snape survived the war.

**Rating: **PG-13

**Wordcount: **4400

**Summary**: Severus could have expected to meet Harry Potter in many places, but not at a potions conference. And especially not a Harry Potter like this.

**Author's Notes**: This is another of my Advent fics, this time for darkhawkhealer, who requested Harry and Snape meeting on equal ground and Snape being impressed. Here you go!

**Defender's Armor**

"And welcome to our featured speaker on the topic of defensive potions work in battle, Harry Potter."

Severus found that he could not move. He would have walked out of the room if he had known those words were to be spoken; he was certain of it, with a certainty as firm as bones. But instead, he sat in the middle of the politely applauding crowd and watched Harry Potter step up to the podium in the front.

The podium was on a raised platform, but the crowd was smaller than the kind Potter could have expected if he was speaking about Defense as an Auror. He didn't look as though that bothered him. He was taller than Severus remembered, taller than the scrawny child who had crept into the Shack to look Severus in the eyes during what should have been his death moment—taller than his father. Older than his father had been when he died, too, a shock that rocked Severus like the bite of poison.

Potter kept his shaggy black hair pulled back in a careless tail that smoothed a lot of the shagginess out of it. And his glasses were small, and he only slipped them onto his face when he had to peer closely at the notes in front of him.

Severus found himself listening for the voice, for the note of arrogance and condescension that he was sure would be there.

It didn't come. Instead, Potter cleared his throat as though in apology and began, "Thank you for listening to me. Most of you know the traditional limit of potions in battle is that they can't be drunk fast enough. I have been working with time-delayed spells, and I have created a combination of potions that can be swallowed before the battle and remain inactive in the blood until called upon…"

The subject was interesting, which, of course, meant that Potter had probably stolen someone else's work. Severus looked around the crowd, studying faces. Who would have considered the research important enough to let someone else take credit for it, as long as it was presented and respectfully listened to?

But no one looked that way. Most people were gravely listening, and some with the spark of interest in their eyes and the flush of it on their cheeks. A few people were talking in low voices to their neighbors or checking their watches. _There are always a few, _Severus thought, mind flashing back to the speeches _he _had given, and the times he had taught and there were people who would not pay attention no matter what.

Then he stiffened again. Why should he care about who wasn't paying attention during Potter's little speech? He should be _rejoicing _that there were people unimpressed by Potter's reputation around him, his own kind. He should be preparing to walk out. He should be _one _of those whispering dissidents!

Instead, Potter's speech drew him in despite himself, particularly the part where Potter described how he had used the time-delay charms to keep the potions from reacting to each other at crucial moments. When Potter finished with an ungraceful, "That's it, really," and some people applauded, Severus had to convince his hands not to move to join them.

People asked questions, of course, and at least _some _of them had the proper spirit and didn't seem inclined to exempt Potter from criticism simply because he was a famous face. Potter listened and responded to most of them intelligently, and only shook his head over one.

"I don't know why I didn't consume Patton's Slowing Elixir," he admitted. "I have to say that most of my knowledge lies outside the Potions field, but I still should have thought of something _that _obvious."

And he didn't look _upset!_ He was _smiling!_ He had learned to _laugh _at himself!

Severus wondered if the way he had saved himself—studying the poison in his bloodstream by the signs as it poured through him and enchanting the few ingredients he carried in his pockets into an antivenin once he was alone—had, after all, been the dream it had always seemed like. Maybe all his life since the Shrieking Shack was only a dream, and he was dreaming then, sitting there and thinking he had heard Harry Potter converse intelligently on a complex Potions topic.

Potter gave his smile around at the rest of the audience and turned to step down from the podium.

He hadn't once looked at Severus or acknowledged him. He might not even have seen him in the crowd.

And that was unacceptable. Severus rose, and ensured that he made his way through the crowd in enough time to intercept Potter at the entrance of the room.

Potter stopped walking when he got to Severus's side and nodded. Severus stared into his eyes, and still found nothing of the mockery that he had expected, that he had thought was an _inescapable _part of the way Potter would always relate to him. Instead, Potter looked as though he was thinking of a nap and a bath after the _difficulty_—Severus sneered—of the talk he had endured.

"Potions master Snape," Potter said. "Did you have a mistake that I made in my talk to point out?"

That made Severus wish he had paid more attention, because doubtless he hadn't paid enough if he hadn't found _one _mistake. But he shook his head, and winced as the stiff muscles in his neck protested against it. "No. I wanted to know what _you_ are doing here, and since when you came to research defensive potions. You are not a Potions master. You don't have the talent."

"No," Potter said, and smiled slightly at him. "You wouldn't believe how much time it's taken me to get even the few potions I do use to work together well."

"I would believe it," Severus snapped.

Potter's smile widened. "Yes, you would, wouldn't you?" he murmured, which wasn't hostile but was provoking, especially when he wasn't trembling in fear of Severus uncovering his mistakes the way Severus had always assumed he would. "But, truly, my specialty is defense. Self-defense, against anything and everything that can attack you."

Severus squinted at him.

Potter had either heard tales of that squint or he remembered something about Severus's expressions from Hogwarts, because he explained. "I wanted to help people like Ron after the war, people who'd lost someone. There was nothing the Mind-Healers could do unless someone was amenable to letting people into his mind, and Ron wasn't. Not that I blame him, with the history of Legilimency I told him about." Severus glanced at him sharply, but Potter's expression was mild; they might have been speaking about some _other _Legilimens who had tried, and failed, to train Potter. "But I thought there might be something you could do with a combination of spells and potions and talking."

"That profession exists, Potter, and is called Healing," Severus said, pleased to have scored a point against him at last.

Potter shook his head, his eyes deep and fiery now. Severus was also pleased to have uncovered the stubborn boy behind the man, but wondered where he had been hiding until now. "No. The Healers deal with poisons and curses and transformations and magical accidents, but they don't deal well with grief. At all. Do you know they didn't do _anything _for Neville, all those years he was visiting his parents in the Janus Thickey ward? Not even common human kindness to make it easier. I wanted to make it easier. No one should have to suffer. I _hate _suffering. I want to make it _go away._ So I set out to find out what would make it go away."

Severus stared at him again. It should have been easy to despise that declaration. It was just the sort of naïve pronouncement that Potter would have launched during his schoolboy days, expecting everyone to applaud him at once.

But if Potter had limited himself to his friend at first, or to other scenarios in the way of the battle situations he had spoken about just now…

"Did it work?" Severus asked, despite himself. Since the war, the test of competence was the only one he truly respected.

"Yes." Potter's smile was one Severus had only seen before in the mirror when he proved some long- and dearly-held theory about experimental potions wrong. "I helped Hermione brew a variation of a Calming Draught that Ron would take, and we also used a Pensieve and a spell that recreated that part of the battle where Fred died, so Ron could say good-bye. It took a long time, but Ron was at peace after that."

Severus nodded slowly. "But no doubt you found it impossible to apply the exact same methods to someone else."

Potter shrugged. "I can _recommend _some of them to people who are in similar situations, which is a start. But yes, I have to work one-on-one with most of my clients. I have to know exactly what they want, what they need, and what they aren't willing to do. Most of the time, I do succeed. The ones I can't, I can at least find a Mind-Healer or other qualified expert for."

"So you take on individual people and then end their suffering?" Severus examined him again. It was so far from anything he could imagine Potter doing. Potter had cared for the whole world; he had cared about doing the things that could give him the greatest amount of glory. Perhaps he had an intellectual dominance among those who knew about his work now, but it wouldn't bring him the same amount of admiration as killing a Dark Lord had.

"So I can _destroy _their suffering," Potter corrected. "Teach them to defend themselves against suffering. Yes."

Severus started to ask another question, but Potter held up a hand so commanding that Severus fell silent and blinked at him. "If you wouldn't mind," Potter said in a gentle murmur, "I'm very tired. I was traveling by Portkey and International Floo last night, and it took me hours to get back on track when they sent me to Iceland, for some reason. I'm going to rest. Nice seeing you again, Snape." He nodded to him, and walked out of the room.

Snape watched him go. From the back, he wouldn't have known it was Potter; the shagginess really _didn't _show when he was wearing his hair like that.

And that was perhaps the biggest difference. Once, he would have known the annoying brat anywhere. Now, he didn't.

And perhaps that meant he wasn't the annoying little brat anymore.

* * *

Severus stepped out of the dining room with a sneer and a shudder. It was full of men and women who wanted to talk about their work—but not in a way that involved listening to what anyone else said, or comparing notes, or making links and connections that would enable them to further their projects in the future. They wanted a willing ear to pour their voices into, and that was all. The balcony would be quieter, and if devoid of an audience, devoid also of those who made an audience impossible.

Severus almost changed his mind and walked back inside when he saw the figure near the railing, however. Potter leaned there with a wineglass dangling limply from his hand, his head bowed as if in contemplation of the moon.

But Potter showed no sign of noticing him, and no coterie hung on his every word. After a few silent seconds of debate, during which Potter remained absorbed in the moonlight, Severus moved slowly towards him instead.

He began to find Potter's obliviousness annoying when he was a meter from him, and loudly cleared his throat. Potter visibly started, but not enough to drop his wineglass. He turned around and nodded, then went back to the light in front of him.

"You seem intent on ignoring your colleagues," Severus murmured, leaning on the railing beside him. "Or do you not consider them your colleagues since you work in a different field?"

Potter shrugged without taking his eyes from the moon. "I'm thinking about my next research project, that's all," he said. "I'm sure that their minds are filled with equally deep and interesting thoughts. But when you're dealing with a werewolf whose major problem is that she has panic attacks every time the moon rises, sometimes you don't have much room for anything else."

Severus blinked. Then he said, "There is so much else to fear about becoming a werewolf."

Potter smiled at him. "Yes, and someday I'll have someone whose primary terror is lycanthropy. But since she can keep her mind with Wolfsbane and there's no cure in sight for the condition right now, she doesn't fear that so much. It's the moon, and it debilitates her when she sees it out during the day or glimpses its light or even sees the shape of a crescent moon on a calendar. That's the problem she came to me to get help with, so it's the one I'm helping her with." He frowned and leaned more over the railing, as though the shadows the moon cast beyond the balcony were fundamentally different than the ones on it.

Severus took a delicate step back. He didn't want accusations of murder to fall on his head when Potter inevitably tumbled to his death over the railing. "How do you think that you can help someone with so irrational a fear?"

"With a Beauty Charm, partially," Potter said, his voice abstracted again. "Teach her to see the moon as a source of beauty, and she'll feel joy and delight in it. Joy and delight are the best antidotes to fear I know."

"They cannot be," Severus snapped. "Neither of them is the emotion induced by a Calming Draught, and Calming Draughts are the potions that are the antidotes to fear."

Potter turned to him, although from the way he cocked his head, he would have far rather kept staring into the sky. That irritated Severus to the point he found it difficult to draw breath. "Really? But you know that a small number of people have a reaction to a Calming Draught that results in giggles, and you know that some people grow giddy on it. It doesn't work for everyone. Sometimes, joy needs to come in and make it work." And he turned back to the moon as though a thousand years of Potions theory could be dismissed in the same way as a single man.

Severus shook his head. His throat was dry and his tongue thick with rage. "You cannot _know that_."

"I know it in the people I work with." Potter glanced at him, and abruptly grimaced. "I'm sorry. I said something careless again, didn't I? I do that a lot. But I do mean what I'm saying. The people I work with find joy and delight the best antidote. Maybe others wouldn't. I don't know. I tend not to look much beyond the individual case."

"A problem you always had," Severus muttered, but he found it tiring to scowl. He turned away instead and stared blindly at a far wall.

Potter walked past him. Severus knew that he did not imagine the hand that rose and squeezed his shoulder, but by the time he turned around and glared, Potter was beyond him, passing through the arched doorway back to the inner rooms.

"I hope you find some peace, Potions master Snape," Potter said.

And the formality was the most infuriating thing of all, but by the time Severus got to the doorway, Potter had vanished in the crowd, leaving Severus to make his way back to his bedroom alone.

* * *

He woke fumbling from what he thought at first was a nightmare, but his hands grabbed the parchment beside his bed and began to write, almost of their own volition, and he recognized the impulse a moment later. One of the dreams that provided inspiration for experimental potions, dreams that he rarely had anymore. He needed to get the ideas down as quickly as he could before they vanished.

And he did. When he managed to blink the sleep fully from his hands and look at the parchment, Severus found instructions that might serve to lift him past at least _one _of the obstacles blocking his path to a reliable Transfiguration Potion, which would let anyone become an Animagus.

The inspiration had come from Potter. He knew that much. The thought of counteracting some of the ingredients in the potion that could make a drinker feel anxious and spoil the transformation with ingredients that induced a state of happiness came straight from his theory.

_His ridiculous theory._

But it was there, and it was an intellectual debt—the only one he had formed at a conference like this in several years.

Severus fell limply back in bed and stared at the ceiling for the rest of the night.

* * *

"Good morning. Is there something I can do for you?"

Severus wanted to bristle at the utter surprise in Potter's voice, but he supposed he couldn't blame the brat. He had sought Potter out at breakfast this morning, coming straight to his table through many others where he could have sat and had privacy, or at least the company of colleagues who had been practicing the art for a long time.

But it wasn't the company of his colleagues he wanted. He wanted the company of the one who had inspired him.

"Breakfast," he said, sitting down in the chair next to Potter and staring at him as hard as he could.

Potter looked thoughtfully back, not flinching from the challenge, and then lifted his hand. One of the house-elves that served the conference appeared, and Potter cocked his head at Severus. Severus folded his arms and said nothing.

"Plain tea," Potter told the elf. "Thick pieces of toast with the lightest butter that you can put on them. A few kippers." The elf nodded and vanished again. Potter turned to Severus with a faint smile. "Did I get it right?"

Severus had made this a test, but he had never expected Potter to _pass_. It took him long moments to force his surprise past the lump in his throat. "I thought you wouldn't remember what I ate for breakfast all those years ago."

"Well, I did." Potter shrugged, and started to turn back to the pamphlet he'd been reading.

Severus reached out and deliberately put a hand over Potter's. Potter looked not at him but around at the other people at the tables, as if he assumed that Severus had forgotten their audience and might want to take back his hand.

Severus had done everything this morning on purpose, though, and he did not withdraw. "I want to know how and why you remembered," he said. "How and why you became the person that you are, instead of the one I expected you to become after the war."

Potter narrowed his eyes, but said nothing, perhaps because the elf returned with Severus's breakfast at the moment. Sure enough, when it had gone and Severus had had time for a few bites of toast and a few sips of tea, Potter said, "What did you expect me to become?"

Severus wouldn't have hesitated to defend his position on Potter's probable transformation only a short day ago, but now he found himself floundering in the face of that quiet gaze. He finally drew himself up and said, "You can't deny that you were a spoiled brat the last time I knew you."

"I can deny the _spoiled_," Potter said, with a quiet inward chuckle that Severus didn't like the sound of. "You never really knew the way I grew up, Snape. But the brat part, maybe." He shrugged. "You're asking a question I've asked myself and not got an answer to. I think living through the war had most of all to do with it, but also I wanted to help people, and also I was bored with the thought of being an Auror once I really _thought _about it."

"But—" Severus spent another minute eating, so he could think about his words, but in the end he came up with nothing diplomatic, and Potter would distrust diplomatic words from him anyway. He chose the bluntest way of saying it. "Your intelligence. I saw no evidence of that before."

"Not in the fields you taught, certainly."

Stung, Severus snapped back, "I taught Defense Against the Dark Arts, too, if you remember."

"Only for a single year. And during a year when I did very little fighting of Death Eaters except at the close, and had other things to focus on." Potter's eyes rested on him, not challenging, and all the more challenging for that. They simply refused, not indignantly, Severus's interpretation of events, which he had never thought to question before. "I was intelligent, Snape. I didn't always use it, no."

Severus snorted bitter agreement.

"But I had the talent, and after the war I chose to exercise it." Potter shrugged and stood up. "It doesn't seem worthwhile talking to you when you won't believe me no matter what I say. Good day, Potions master. Enjoy your breakfast."

And to Severus's intense astonishment, Potter turned and walked away as if—

As if nothing Severus did mattered to him at all.

And Severus, who had come intending to work the discussion back around to theory and what he had gained from Potter in conversation the night before, found himself sitting there with little appetite for the food that followed.

* * *

"I wished to talk to you before you left the conference."

Potter looked at him warily. His gloved hands were full of rose clippings; the gardens at the conference were open to anyone who wanted to venture into them and harvest the ingredients. "Yes?" he asked, his voice polite and empty.

He had been more welcoming to Severus last night, even distracted by the moon. Severus was determined to have that back again, but he knew only one way to get it, offensive as expressing admiration was to him.

"Your potions theory makes sense," Severus said. "That is something you could never have done before this."

Potter shifted his weight to one leg and reached out to pluck another rose from the bushes. "You don't know when I began to change," he said, politely but firmly. "You have _no idea _of the decisions I've made and the ways I've grown. So excuse me for thinking that your praise doesn't mean much because of that."

Severus stared at him, lips parted. It was the same attitude he had seen in Potter when he left Severus at the breakfast table—

That he didn't _care _what Severus thought. That he had put that phase of his life behind him with ease and gentleness that Severus had never mastered.

And that made Severus want his attention all the more. Someone who wanted nothing from him, who held no guilt over him, who wielded no weapon and no grudge against him, but would still speak to him, was worth infinitely more than patronizing colleagues or people who wanted to benefit from Severus's own intelligence or those who turned away with their noses in the air because of the Dark Mark.

Potter knew his past. There would be no surprises there, no sudden repudiation of Severus years after the fact.

Severus cleared his throat. "As a matter of fact," he said, "your theory inspired one of mine last night."

For the first time today, Potter glanced at him with a flicker of interest in his eyes. "Really?" he asked.

Severus nodded, and told the furiously pounding heartbeat in his ears that it could wait. "Yes. What you said about joy made me think that I might be able to add some joy-causing ingredients to a potion of my own."

Potter at once leaned forwards, resting the roses he still held against a mostly-stripped bush that his weight couldn't damage. "And what would you classify as joy-causing ingredients?" he demanded. "Just because it makes certain people laugh doesn't mean it works the same way for everyone. Remember what I said about Calming Draughts."

Severus gazed at him once more. He could hear, as if from another garden, echoes of the conversations they would have in the future. The debates that Potter would involve him in. The debates he would instigate, because clearly he knew more about potions than the modest knowledge he had disclaimed.

He could feel the way that Potter might reach out to him—a careful touch at first, then a careless tug on his elbow when Potter wanted his attention, and then finally to help with the cauldron, with the experimental potions like the Transformation Potion Severus was working on.

He could see the bright sparks of that intelligence rising and falling in his mind, hear the words Potter would speak in proof of it. Not showing it off, simply demonstrating it, the mind that Severus would have given a great deal years ago to see in any student but Malfoy and Granger.

_Better late than never._

And he thought he could _taste _the future, too, staring at the shape of Potter's lips and the way his hands moved in front of him.

"Snape? Did you hear my question?"

Severus woke up and looked at Potter. Still hovering, like a hawk, ready to dart away if Severus offered him the same sort of insults he would have in the past. And still ready to plunge down from a height and dazzle Severus with his speed, with what he had to offer.

"One word in your question is inappropriate," Severus said. "Call me by my first name. That is what colleagues should do, should they not?"

Potter blinked a few times, eyelids dipping down over his eyes and hiding the glorious certainty. Then he smiled. "Severus," he said.

Severus turned to walk with him through the rose garden, feeling the weight of the hawk settle on his gloved fist.

**The End.**


	20. Crystalline Dreams

**Title: **Crystalline Dreams

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Angst

**Wordcount:** 3700

**Summary: **Harry has dreams of Draco Malfoy, dreams as intense as fire—and apparently only a crystal pendant to blame for them.

**Author's Notes: **Another of my Advent fics, written for lunakat, who requested _Harry and Draco rarely cross paths however a gift from a secret santa causes a lonely harry to begin having powerfully realistic dreams of Draco at night. Harry begins stalking Draco in the hopes to understand why._ Sorry, lj user="lunakat", but I couldn't find a way to work in Draco working in a Muggle soup kitchen near the holidays.

**Crystalline Dreams**

Harry twisted in the sheets, shaking his head. He knew that Draco Malfoy didn't _really _have that darkness in his eyes, or the silvery scars that ran down and around his chest in a pattern that made it look as though someone had flayed him. Snape had used the spell and the ointment that were supposed to reverse the scars, obscure them, make them not real. So he couldn't look like that, and that meant he couldn't be standing here in Harry's bedroom staring at him.

But he was there anyway, and his smile was something Harry didn't want to face, so he closed his own eyes.

"You can't escape that way," Malfoy whispered, his words as light as falling snowflakes. "Here. Touch me. Feel what you did to me." He reached out, Harry knew he reached out, because the next instant his fingers closed around Harry's hand and he jerked on it sharply. Harry found himself pulled forwards, whether or not he wanted to be, and his fingers landed on the scars.

They were ridged beneath his fingers, hard, but warm with a wonderful life. Harry remembered a book Hermione had lent him that said not everyone who got scars lost sensitivity in them, that some people had delicate skin above them instead.

From the way Malfoy sucked in his breath and bowed his head, it seemed he was one of those people.

"You made them," Malfoy whispered, his mouth as hot and red as the flush that Harry could feel on his face. "You're the right one to touch them, and _keep on _touching them. Feel what you did." He pulled Harry closer again.

But this time, it wasn't just revenge. His eyes said that, and his smile said that. Harry closed his eyes again.

No hiding, no running away, not when Malfoy was kissing him with a bite here and a bite there, and Harry was shuddering and bringing his hands up in a feeble attempt to resist. Malfoy caught his hands with an easy twist and pinned them to the bed, and then pushed him back with his own hand in the center of Harry's chest, where Harry would have taken scars if Malfoy had used _Sectumsempra _on _him_.

Harry fell back, because the warmth of that palm was an unanswerable push, and Malfoy crawled on top of him. He had scars everywhere, it seemed, or else how would the skin of his chest and belly dragged over Harry's make them tingle so?

Harry opened his eyes at some point, surrendering to the inevitable, and saw the way that the smile had deepened and infected all of Malfoy's face, the greedy way he used to reach out and stroke down Harry's shoulders, admiring the plunder he had taken for himself.

_Malfoy _would _make love that way, _the thought darted into Harry's head. _He would act like it was his personal triumph if I lay down with him._

Which made it all the more imperative to figure out why Harry was simply lying here and letting it happen…

* * *

And then he opened his eyes.

Harry swallowed and pressed his hand over his forehead again, closing them. Painful rays of sunlight came through the dull curtains. He _knew _it had been a mistake to buy a house with an east-facing bedroom.

_That's torn it, _he had to admit, after another few minutes of lying there and trying to pretend that the dream hadn't made him hard. _Two dreams in a row could be a coincidence, but not three. And it's all the fault of that damn pendant._

He turned to look at the pendant, which hung from a chain above his bed. It was a small circle, made of transparent crystal, the bottom part of which was slightly darker than the top, as though someone had passed a shadow over it and frozen that inside the crystal. Through the top was a hole for the chain, which had come with the pendant. The chain had more ornamentation than the crystal itself did, since it was made of silver with a few letters carved into the sides. The letters said simply, _For you._

Someone had sent it to Harry a week ago, wrapped in silver paper with a green bow on the top. Harry had snorted when he saw the paper, and harder when he saw what was inside it.

He knew where it came from, if not who. The Ministry had assigned a bunch of people who worked in the various Departments to play gift-giver to each other, and someone had drawn his name and had not the slightest idea of what to send him. Or perhaps they had panicked and thought Harry Potter was rich enough to buy anything he wanted.

_Not happiness, or a family._

So they had sent along something that they hoped was mysterious and beautiful enough to match the décor they no doubt imagined was all over his flat. Harry had accepted the gift and hung it up because he didn't want his gift-giver to feel ashamed, and made sure to hold it up to loud admiration when he received the package in the Ministry.

The colors of the paper suggested a former Slytherin, but other than that, Harry had not the slightest idea where the thing came from. And now it was apparently giving him these strange dreams.

_I do _not _want Draco Malfoy to make me touch his scars and then climb on top of me._

Except when Harry glanced down between his legs, it seemed part of him wanted that very much indeed.

Harry scowled and hopped out of bed to take a cold shower. More than likely the pendant had some sort of enchantment on it and was picking up and projecting the dreams to tease him, but it didn't explain why it had picked Malfoy as the target. Harry hadn't seen him to do more than nod at him in years, and then only because they both worked in the Ministry and certain geniuses—like the ones behind the plan to assign gift-givers to each other—_would _decide that members from different parts of the Ministry should come to the parties.

So. It was time to go to the source, as it were, and look for answers around Malfoy.

But because Malfoy might not know any of the truth any more than Harry did, and because Hogwarts was in Harry's mind as he showered, and because Harry doubted Malfoy _would _tell him the truth outright if he _did _know it, he decided that he wouldn't ask directly, either. He would try following Malfoy about for a while, and see what came of it.

* * *

Harry frowned, and ducked out of sight for the third time that morning. Malfoy was harder to follow than he had thought.

Of course, it could have been worse. If Malfoy had pursued that apprenticeship among the Unspeakables that people were talking about him doing a few years ago, then Harry could have faced the shut doors of the Department of Mysteries. And there were certain memories that he couldn't bring himself to awaken. He would have thrown the bloody pendant away and endured the dreams if they continued.

Instead, Malfoy worked for the Department of International Magical Cooperation, and Harry had never _met _such a meddling bunch of people.

As Malfoy moved through the Department—and so far he'd done nothing more than take a cup of tea and proceed towards his desk—people stopped and questioned him on reports he was writing. They shared gossip about diplomats and ambassadors and their retinues coming to visit Britain. They leaned close and murmured confidential things that made Malfoy smile and shake his head.

And they looked at everyone who passed them as if Snape would be giving them an exam on the shape of their noses later.

Harry _hated _it. It didn't help that his glamour, although it included charms that made people less interested in him, also resembled the faces of several people that those in the Department apparently knew. Already they'd called to Harry to slow down and chat with them, under the names of Bedivere, Arnold, and Rodger, and each time, Harry had to shake his head and mutter and hurry on, as if on an important mission. Sooner or later, he would meet someone who wouldn't take no for an answer.

At least Malfoy's cubicle was just ahead.

"Ah, Donald!"

There was a heavy hand on Harry's shoulder, and Malfoy was turning around curiously. Harry found himself pinned between the cheerful, French-accented wizard who was apparently convinced that he knew Harry and the sudden stare of Malfoy.

The glamour held up, though. Harry knew that Malfoy would sneer and let his eyes slide away when he saw the red hair, and sure enough, he did, striding into his cubicle with a firm motion that seemed to proclaim his ability to do his job well in defiance of all Weasleys everywhere.

The wizard behind him turned out to be a member of the French Wizarding Ambassador's intimate circle, who believed that Harry was his assigned guide for the day. It took Harry forever to shake him off, and by the time he did, all his chances of spying on Malfoy were ruined.

Maybe he should just give up. Surely the dreams couldn't be _that _bad.

* * *

Harry opened his eyes gasping from a dream where Malfoy had led him to the edge of a cliff, whispering that if they leaped off together, they could fly.

And then he had tumbled backwards, and Harry had leaped after him without thinking about what he was doing, and Malfoy had wrapped his arms around Harry in midair and grown wings, and Harry had flown with him, while Malfoy made love to him with a single-minded dedication that left Harry's sheets sticky when he woke up.

Harry lay there and stared up at the glittering pendant, which was spinning from the impact of his head against the headboard when he woke with a shout.

_No. _He was going to figure this out, and why whoever had sent the stupid gift wanted him to dream of Malfoy in particular.

* * *

Spying on Malfoy in the Ministry hadn't worked wonders, so this time Harry waited for him in a small sandwich shop where he knew Malfoy liked to go for lunch. He kept his head bowed and his glamour on, apparently absorbed in the thick book in front of him. It was one that Hermione had given him ages ago, about things to do with your life after a traumatic experience—like a war—but Harry hadn't read it then and didn't intend to now. He liked being an Auror just fine, thank you, and he was only having strange dreams now because whoever had given him the pendant was an idiot.

Malfoy came through the door. Harry studied him warily from under his fringe as Malfoy ordered a sandwich and stood chattering with someone who had come in behind him.

Malfoy was more attractive than he had been, that was for bloody sure. Harry reckoned learning to smile had done it. And Malfoy didn't once mention Slytherin or "the Dark Lord" or "my father" when he was talking—flirting—with the brown-haired wizard who had entered the shop behind him, which surely added to it.

_He's not a boy anymore._

Something low down in Harry's stomach unfolded in lazy agreement with that sentiment when Malfoy turned away from the counter with his sandwich. _Yes, indeed. _Malfoy looked far more fit and relaxed than he should.

Harry froze a minute later. The _pendant _was giving him those dreams! He didn't _believe _in them!

Malfoy caught his eye, and seemed to believe Harry was staring because of some reason that had nothing to do with his good looks. He immediately straightened up and assumed a shade of the hauteur Harry had seen on him during school, but this time, it was obviously a shield, and Harry knew how to shelter behind shields, too.

"Did you have something you wished to say to me?" he demanded.

Harry could have shaken his head, could have walked away, could have done a lot of things which weren't what he did next. But he ended up blinking and saying, "Not really. I was thinking that you—looked good." He could feel the blush scorching his cheeks in the next moment, but at least he was blushing as the glamoured young man and not as Harry Potter.

Malfoy stared at him. Then he reached up and touched his forehead as though he thought the shape of his face might have changed.

Harry had done the same thing sometimes when people told him the scar looked good, not just a strange or disfigured part of him. The memory made him sympathetic enough that he blurted out, "No. Just the way you are. Not with anything changed. Don't change anything."

Malfoy blinked at him, caught, off-balance. Harry didn't know what he would have said, though, because he'd already embarrassed himself, and he got up, slapped some money down, and ran out of the shop as soon as he could. He hoped that his glamour was holding up under the searching glances he knew he was getting, from just not Malfoy but the other customers. Luckily, the Apparition point wasn't far away.

* * *

"Listen to me. You're beautiful."

Harry tried to pull his legs up to his chest, partially to hide the way Malfoy's words affected his cock and partially because that would enable him to kick the git away, but Malfoy laid his hands on Harry's knees and forced them down and apart. And once he did that, his eyes were so bright and greedy that Harry found himself letting them lie there.

"You like those words," Malfoy whispered, breath hot and steady. "You wish that other people said them more often, didn't you? But you won't ask for compliments, because you're so afraid of coming off as conceited and arrogant."

He leaned closer and closer, and all Harry could think of was his breath and his hot lips and the heat in his eyes.

"But I listened to them from you," Malfoy whispered, in the moment before their lips met. "And that means you have to listen to them from me."

* * *

Harry stepped into the jewelry shop and looked around uneasily for a moment. The pendants hanging from the ceiling on slender silver chains, like the one he'd had strung up over his bed, stirred and jangled and whispered, but he didn't see anyone else human yet.

Stalking Malfoy hadn't paid off. Worse, the pendant was taking things that had happened in real life and incorporating them into his dreams now. Harry had had to go for a brisk walk this Saturday morning to get rid of the feelings that dream had given him.

And then he had looked up and seen identical pendants hanging in the shop window. That let him know he _had _to go inside, and at least see what they were and if the shopkeeper remembered selling that one to someone.

"Can I help you?"

The shopkeeper was there after all, a tall man with a long white beard and intense blue eyes. Harry took a deep breath, shook off his memories of Dumbledore, and pointed at a crystal pendant that looked exactly the like one he'd got, hole and all. "Someone sent me a pendant like that, and it's been giving me these intense dreams about someone I hadn't seen in a long time and never cared about before. Do you remember who you sold it to?"

The shopkeeper jerked to a stop, and then said, "Well now. If you showed me whether you have a scar on your forehead, I could answer that question better."

Harry hesitated, but the man's manner wasn't really threatening. He swept his fringe up and away from the lightning bolt scar.

The shopkeeper stared at him for long moments, until Harry was afraid that he was facing another crazy fan and thought of backing away and out the door. Then the shopkeeper nodded, almost dreamily. "Yes. You were the one he was dreaming about."

Harry blinked even harder, wondering how the man could see dreams—unless the pendants in the shop reflected them or something, when they were in the right mood. "Who?"

"Draco Malfoy," said the man, and reached out to tap a finger against the nearest pendant. It rang, small shivering echoes that pelted up and down the walls. "He came here to choose a gift for someone else, but he lingered and looked at the pendants for a long time, and held one while thinking about you. I saw the reflections of the memories and dreams in the pendant later. It had become attuned to him. That happens, sometimes. It makes them useless for anyone else." He smiled slightly. "I sent it to the one it was destined for."

"But I thought it was a gift from someone at the Ministry!"

The man looked at him patiently, and although the glint in his eyes was a little sharper than Dumbledore's twinkle, he otherwise looked enough like him to make Harry catch his breath. "You were wrong."

Harry shook his head, but did think to ask, "Why didn't Malfoy buy the pendant?"

"I assume that he decided the price was too dear," said the shopkeeper, spreading his hands. "I charge only what it costs me in time and labor and magic to make them. I should bill him the Galleons that were wasted when the pendant became attuned to him and could not be sold to anyone else. But perhaps not, if the dreams have come to you."

Harry shook his head a second time. "Why is telling you that enough to make you change your mind?"

"I like happy endings," said the shopkeeper. "And to see my treasures get to where they should go, although I must say that I never expected this ending." He eyed Harry for a moment. "Why are you still here? No, the pendant won't hurt you, but you won't stop experiencing the dreams as long as you possess it, either. Go and speak to the one who's _really _behind my sending it to you."

Harry spent a long moment swallowing. But he had already made a beginning with Malfoy, hadn't he? He had given him some compliments. He turned and walked out the door.

* * *

"Um. So that's it."

Malfoy had let him in with nothing more than a slight paling of his face. Harry thought he had guessed that Harry was the glamoured young man who'd spoken to him yesterday. And he'd sat through Harry's explanation of what had happened to the pendant without moving his lips. Harry glanced at him uneasily. He thought he'd explained it well, or as well as he could be expected to under the circumstances, and that Malfoy should have made some response now.

Then he did. Malfoy covered his face with shaking hands, took in a deep breath that seemed to fill his lungs with more air than flowed through the room outside them, and stood up.

Harry braced to be thrown out the door. No matter how reasonably he'd listened, Malfoy probably had recovered himself by now and would see no reason to let Harry stay.

Malfoy halted in front of him, staring down at him. Harry looked up at him. "What are you going to do?" he asked without thinking, not sure if he'd even _willed _himself to say something like that.

"Accept that my dreams aren't going away," Malfoy whispered, sounding as if he was talking to himself. "Accept that—that there is always going to be part of me that wants to do _this_."

And he reached out and seized Harry's arms, pulling him into a kiss so savage that Harry yelped, and lost the yelp against Malfoy's lips.

Malfoy worked fast. He had Harry's shirt off before Harry thought about what he was doing, and he pushed Harry back against the couch and climbed on top of him. Other than taking an elbow in the stomach, Harry didn't see much to complain about. He opened his mouth and lifted his head, and Malfoy's hand reached down to his groin.

For some reason, he didn't take Harry's trousers off. He just worked him fast, intensely, staring into his eyes all the while. When Harry whined at him, he leaned nearer and kissed him again. When Harry started to close his eyes, Malfoy gripped his chin and shook him slightly, and Harry opened them again in sheer surprise.

So he was looking into Malfoy's eyes when he came, and Malfoy followed a moment later, apparently from the experience of seeing him come, his face sleek and pointed and so _intent_, like a hawk diving out of the sky. Harry leaned into his chest and said nothing, only listened to, and felt, Malfoy shuddering above him.

"So," Malfoy said, when long moments had passed and the sweat and other things were cooling between them.

Harry licked his lips, found his throat dry, and said, "So."

"I suppose we try it and see how this works." Malfoy's hand moved restlessly up to Harry's shoulder, then traveled along it lightly enough to raise the little hairs there. "Because that was only one dream, and I'm _not _giving up the chance to make more come true."

Harry had to close his eyes. "I hoped you'd say that," he whispered, and turned his head to kiss Malfoy's still-clothed shoulder.

**The End.**


End file.
